Rally!!!

[RyNinDaCleM]

we will probably have a test of $3 soon

It is time to become bear:

interesting screenshot... i didn't realise how different it looked in other browsers (compared to Chrome). it's completely invisible in IE and looks really weird in Opera.

anyway, only 4 blocks left til the drop!

2 blocks now!

It's like counting down to the new year!

[ineededausername]

1 block!
edit: oops.... 2 blocks

[nmat]

Difficulty down to 1,203,462.

So where are all the new coins?

[Sargasm]

So does lower difficulty likely mean lower price for BTC?  Do they correlate in both directions? 

I know price definitely effects difficulty in the long run... but visa versa?

[payb.tc]

So does lower difficulty likely mean lower price for BTC?  Do they correlate in both directions? 

potentially, if lower difficulty (more quickly) increases supply without a corresponding increase in demand.

[nmat]

So does lower difficulty likely mean lower price for BTC?  Do they correlate in both directions?  

I know price definitely effects difficulty in the long run... but visa versa?

This means that miners will get additional 50/100 coins per hour (comparing to the last couple of weeks). I don't think there is a strong relation between difficulty and price, but the price is defined by a lot of factors and the amount of coins received by the miners is definitely one of them.

[deepceleron]

Analysis:
It looks like big buy order took the price from 3.25 to 3.50 (but cleaned out the sell book in that range), then with the sell book empty up to 3.50, a rally to 3.80 from lower volume buys was much easier.

How quickly does the mtGox trade algorithm move? If you put in a buy for say 100000 btc at 10$ to grab all the open sell orders, how close would the timestamps be on all the little transactions that creates?

within seconds

Here's a youtube vid of the mtgox hack/crash. It took 10 minutes+ to clear the order book, which was probably the hacker putting in just one or a few big sales.