MtGox is known for abusing the market and cancelling trades when the price falls significantly. It happened before [1].<p>One way to look at it is that they prevent a bank run. The other perspective is that they trick people into thinking the market price is higher than it really is, making unaware people lose even more money as they buy at the high price and the crash happens anyway, just over a longer time.<p>[1] <a href="http://www.malwaretech.com/2013/11/mtgox-nearly-breaks-bitcoinagain.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.malwaretech.com/2013/11/mtgox-nearly-breaks-bitco...</a>
Reminds me of the beginning of Arthur C. Clarke's "Childhood's End" (or was it "Fountains of Paradise"? It's been decades since I've read them), where he explains how, even in a networked, high-speed trading world, the stock trading system can get overloaded by orders and lag will cause the system to spiral out of control and collapse, repeating, in essence, the Crash of Black Tuesday.<p>I found that interesting because it showed how, despite advances in technology which we'd expect to solve failures of previous systems, the same fundamental vulnerabilities remained, just at a different scale.
Whoa! It's plummeting just as I come here to read this thread.<p><a href="http://bitcointicker.co/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcointicker.co/</a><p>I saw the first news of the Chinese restrictions last evening (United States time zones) and a person who kindly replied to my post here yesterday recommended the link I've just put here for tracking the price of Bitcoin. I saw this thread just after seeing<p><a href="http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-china-bitcoin-20131205,0,2766336.story" rel="nofollow">http://www.latimes.com/business/money/la-fi-mo-china-bitcoin...</a><p>on Google News.
This also happened on the 19th. There was an article posted explaining that their crash prevention code was processing a big sell order, reversing, and then infinite looping. This looks like the same thing.
To expect that something volatile is anything other than volatile is, in general, folly. BTC may stabilize with time, but people throwing large quantities of money at it quickly doesn't help.<p>If BTC gains worldwide acceptance, it will be at the begrudging reluctance of governments.
I made similar screenshot as the one from this article. I noticed strange periodic behavior of bitcoinwisdom.com, asked myself WTF, uploaded image to imgur, then made a post on HN. Within 5 minutes, I guessed that this behavior is caused by the javascript replaying stale package of transactions and not getting new ones. I reloaded the page, artifact disappeared, I took down HN post to avoid misleading people (it got two upvotes already and one comment). Now I see this what I thought was local glitch prominently featured as a part of front page article. I guess it wasn't so local and accidental after all.<p>Since the image in article comes from <a href="http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoin.clarkmoody.com/</a> not bitcoinwisdom I guess it was some glitch in MtGox API or case of clients wasn't able to tell that what they get from API is stale data not expected fresh one.<p>My screenshot from bitcoinwisdom: <a href="http://imgur.com/Q6gKIok" rel="nofollow">http://imgur.com/Q6gKIok</a>
Todays (6/12) somewhat sluggish decline[1] is perhaps largely US driven, beginning at around 8AM EST (1PM UTC). Yesterdays crash was sharp, surrounding the Chinese announcement, and was at around 4 PM China time[2] but the price soon bounced back.<p>Overall not very interesting.<p>[1] <a href="http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-06zeg2013-12-06ztgMzm1g10zm2g25zv" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-06ze...</a><p>[2] <a href="http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-05zeg2013-12-05ztgMzm1g10zm2g25zv" rel="nofollow">http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/btcnCNY#rg1zczsg2013-12-05ze...</a>
A couple of days ago commenter on HN said they had pulled their savings from the bank and dumped it into bitcoins. It will probably recover but betting on bitcoins is akin to taking one hell of a ride by the looks of things.
You can see the last 24 hours here. Note data collection for MtGox was stalled due to their extreme server load. <a href="http://live.bitcoinindex.es/" rel="nofollow">http://live.bitcoinindex.es/</a>
How can anyone make seriously make statements like this:<p>> Following a steep decline that saw the currency trade at prices not seen since late November<p>That was 2 or 3 weeks ago and they speak of it like it was a generation ago.
This topic is full of bitcoin advocates doing terrible jobs of reconciling themselves to a new .800~.900 standard USD.<p>However you criticize MtGox, this has spread to other exchanges. That's the price now.<p>Personally, I think this is the effect of the Chinese market reversing its positivity on Bitcoin.<p>(which is an outgrowth of bitcoin's lack of delivery on any significant front.)