Blood not on the street yet

Previous China's ban caused a panic that brings price down to 2xxx CNY level (3xxUSD). (I ordered at 19xxCNY and missed, but that was a close bet. Luckily I didn't announce that bet and lose face:) There had been no sign of bitcoin network failing by that time, and smart investors hedged against this already (I posted many a post saying it is impossible that Chinese government not to ban bitcoin when it reach significance, well before the 5th Dce ban.)

This time MtGox issued statement that it is not their problem: bitcoin network is failing (unless patched), bitcoin developers fire back on media, but soon Bitstamp failed bitcoin withdraw, and Btc-E too for a brief while. To a non-cryptographist, say a fund manager, the sequence of events look very much like that MtGox said the truth, that bitcoin protocol is broken, and bitcoin developers didn't realize its impact or was lying to the media. To them this is a sign of bitcoin network failing. It questions the future of the currency. Sure investors are more 'weathered' than a few months ago, but that is a weak factor. There is no reason why this plummet should be less than the last.

MtGox's recent action do not look like a conspiracy to me. They suddenly face a good opportunity of insider deals, covering their lose if there had been any, at the cost of mistakes of panic investors, but there is no way to confirm that it is planed, so I'll keep speculating that this is an unexpected event. Along this line, from engineering point view, any fix within a week is already very fast, and you more or less know it from reading development notes on github. The fix is going to last for a while, so the panic wil continue. I don't know how long, may be a few days, or weeks, but now is not the lowest point. I am not seeing blood on the street yet. Lok out the window I am only seeing snow. (It is a Chinese joke, snow and blood pronounce the same in Chinese).

The boom after China's bad news be consumed called in a lot of new investors, it is about the time they quit. This makes new investors more cautious, which would delay the periodic spike for some months. Previously the time between each spike (spike = growth of more than 2 times in short while) is from one year to half a year and geting shorter. After this event the next spike may be postponed to April or even later.