And up to $115 is also 2k.  Y'all led, but no one followed.  Sorry bears, I think this pathetic run isn't going anywhere.  Would love to join you, but it's not worth 1% for the risk of getting stranded.

I saw that, too, but those small sales stopped when the price hit $115.  I was also seeing the same kind of behavior when the price was below $110, with small buys happening regularly until the price was back up to $110.

I think there's a sly market maker at work gently enforcing their desired exchange rate.  All the bears hoping for <$110, and the bulls hoping for >$120, are likely to be disappointed unless their limit orders can be hit by big movements.  Prepare for a boring time the next few weeks.

About 500 btc of this selling came from margin short selling on bitfinex, with two medium-size sales of 420 btc and 208 btc about 3 hours ago:
https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/public_log

My take is that the T&A crowd seems more sure of their analysis than anyone else, and use margin trading to push for their desired result.

Can't know for sure, but any trades with minus number volume are either short sales or the closing of a long position, and my guess is that it's the former given the recent downtrend.

The speculation game seems a lot like warfare.  Did the army actually withdraw, or did they want to make you believe they withdrew before attacking?

All I know is that the $1m that was removed was at under $50 USD.

Kashmir Hill, the journalist that lived off of bitcoin for a week, is friends with several people at EFF.  Marcia Hoffman is "senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation"

https://twitter.com/kashhill/status/329674086550736897

I just don't see the price dropping below $100 ever again.  Unlike 2011, there are deep-pocketed investors now backstopping the currency, and they have millions riding on bitcoin businesses.  If there's a crash, bitcoin would be oversold, and these investors have access to the millions of USD needed to buy up low-priced coins.

I think this already happened once: the morning mini-crash on May 3rd was apparently stopped when a single user, likely waking up at ~8 AM PST, bought up all the coins from $84 to $98, and the price has never dropped below $90 since then.  And perhaps not coincidentally, the Winkelvii live in California, as do most of the silicon valley VCs.

With the recent increased interest by the investing class -- the only players that can actually affect the price now -- I think that by first week in June, the exchange rate will pop over $130, and then to $150 by the end of June.  The exchange rate might touch $110, as it did on the Gox/Dwolla news, but I doubt it. </falsifiable prediction>

Agreed, they're slower by orders of magnitude than they should be.  A friend of mine works for a company that designs & programs custom hardware used by these high speed traders.  Order are processed in 1-10 microseconds, not tens of milliseconds.  The kicker is that they're been slow for years, which is inexcusable.  And they never bothered to rebrand to something bitcoin specific instead of Magic The Gather Online eXchange.

By comparison, this is what 10 milliseconds of stock trading of Merck looks like between various worldwide exchanges (London, NYSE, etc):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=rB5jJuMP84E

I'm taking advantage of the lull in activity to cash out of Gox, and after their wire arrives, I'll send a wire to bitstamp.  I hope the exchange spread lasts until funds arrive.

I do find it odd that there are bid walls on MtGox USD, EUR, and CAD.  After being up for 5 hours, the wall is looking less and less fake.

And in stark contrast, Bitstamp still has a sell wall.  It's only half of the 8k sell wall it was last week, but there are almost as many coins are for sale below $132 on Bitstamp (4777) as on MtGox (4869).

Only 18% return in one month, woe is me!  But I know what you mean, it's easy to get hooked on 50-100% per month ROI.  Bitcoin risks are a lot lower now than they were last year, with oodles of good news and publicity so far this year, so it does make sense that returns are now lower than they used to be.

I figure if I can make 5-10% per month, it's worth my time and risk to keep playing in this market, independent of philosophical reasons to be involved in bitcoin economy.  The buy and hold strategy may no longer be the best strategy, though. A 5-10% uptick or downtick could happen at basically anytime, and countering these big market moves is still more profitable than most other investments.

ECardOne has a new domain:
http://banking.ecardone.eu/

Because they're losing market share, and it might be due to their high fees.  It's especially high when you realize they take the fee from _both_ parties, so they skim 0.6% to 1.0% of every trade.

Not only that, but there's $570000 in leveraged long positions on bitfinex according to https://www.bitfinex.com/pages/stats , which is about the same as the order book at Bitstamp!

If my math is right, a long position taken at $105 at 2.5:1 leverage and 90% reserve would get liquidated at $75.  Since there's only 3100 btc to $75, someone could sell 3100 btc down to $75, then likely catch the subsequent liquidations to regain their bitcoin holdings at a lower price.  Hmm.  Perhaps that's what the eager bitstamp seller was trying to do when they dropped the price to $90?  Or perhaps there was an eager seller to $95, and the rest was the liquidation of a bitfinex user that took a long position at $120+?  Big liquidations like that used to happen all the time when Bitcoinica allowed 10:1 leverage.

The selloff started while USA was asleep, so perhaps it's attempted arbitrage by European users: sell out now, withdraw via SEPA (which is still available from Gox), and rebuy on a different exchange in a week or two?  Under the circumstances, new fiat is unlikely to be deposited at Gox, so price won't go up, except perhaps for impatient Americans.  Today's the day we learn who is playing with money they can't afford to lose.