The fees were about to come. The timing is a bit puzzling but really it's been a while already since the announcements (in BTC time-scale a few weeks is a lot of time).

Or is the bitcoin exchange market a "winner takes all" market?

And if they "win" and start charging a fee, wouldn't it immediately open a new opportunity for someone to come up with a platform with lower fees?

(honestly asking... Btw I'm european and I'm on Bitstamp for trading Bitcoins)

Basically I think it is reasonable to assume that this news is the reason for the decline.

It's far easier to find causes than to predict details. For example, you know the numbers on some companies are going to be released at exactly 2:00pm, and then at 2:00pm related stocks move twice as much as they had in the previous week. You can't profit off of "80% chance of moving strongly up or down at this specific time", but you can make highly accurate claims about causes.

And then, there is the fact that you can make money off people coming late to the market. This is an old trick.

This is an issue with USD (as dollar bills in your pocket or in a bank account) and MTGXUSD (as dollar units in a Mt Gox account). MTGXUSD are worth less than USD because of two factors; one is potential regulatory issues, and the other is that you are buying future dollars, which are cheaper than right now dollars.

Because MTGXUSD are cheaper than USD, you need more of them to buy BTC, and thus the price differential.

Mt Gox is based in Japan, and very public about operations.

I'm going a bit off topic here, but one of the major weaknesses I see of Bitcoin are the exchanges. For the currency to survive, in the way it was intended, I think there needs to exist a decentralized exchange as secure as Bitcoin itself. If someone wants to work on this, shoot me an email.

Many people invest dollars into Bitcoin because they believe it will increase in dollar value.

If they exchange their Bitcoins for dollars at Mt Gox, they know they will have to wait to get the dollars. They believe that, while they are waiting, the value of Bitcoin will probably rise. So they demand the expected future value of their Bitcoins, not the present value.

And corporations now, as well.

So, if we are to look at this situation honestly the only real conclusion to be made is that this is an act of legitimization on the part of the Chinese law-makers, and we can all just stop pretending that .btc are not here to stay, and be used, and .. compete on the global money markets.

What I really can only say, in the rush of it all, is that I hope we can finally end the hegemony of the Petro-dollar, and all those invested in its persistence .. for it has been a very vile instrument, and the time has come. Crypto-currency has the stage.

I'm not aware of anyone who said BTC was immune from regulation.

There just needs to be a few killer apps on TOR (drugs, gambling, whatever) and bitcoin will always have some value.

Use mtgox since for the most part other exchanges follow gox.

1. Using half (or more) of your coins, sell out all the high bids you can at once. this will grow the gap between asks and bids.

2. at the same time, create an ask wall using the remainder of your coins at a penny above the highest bid you couldn't sell to. This will ensure that no transactions occur at a higher price than your artifically-created low.

3. auto-traders that haven't adjusted will eat away at this ask wall to some degree, which will make the buy and sell price basically identical.

4. Since all of the indicators look consistently bad, automated traders will adjust to this lower price, lowering their asks to below your wall to try to exit quickly. This is also when a lot of panicky weak hands will exit.

5. This is when you want to DoS the exchange. It's important to do this AFTER the price has adjusted, so that the outage creates more confusion and hysteria, but there is an overwhelming sense of a crash. If you can deface a site to report a wallet compromise, that's even better.

At this point, people should be desperate to get out at any price.

It'd have to look like a legitimate rumor, but this would work because speculators tend to easily spook (at least in other markets) and no one wants some anonymous internet person stealing all of their money.

Counterparty risk is huge in the BTC world unfortunately.

To paraphrase a once great govenator.

The key to success is to buy when I sell, Sell when I buy, work hard and marry a Kennedy.

See the article [1] on the website of Xinhuanet [2].

[1] http://news.xinhuanet.com/fortune/2013-12/17/c_125874796.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinhua_News_Agency

She wasn't too concerned. Surprisingly she seems to really understand the disruptive nature of cryptocurrency.

She is a fashion designer, by the way, and I never really explained Bitcoin to her - she just bought in.

Disclaimer: She used to be some kind of Age of Empires II master nerd back in the days. Trust me - I never saw anybody playing that game like her. I was humbled...

Isn't the viability of the distributed ledger predicated on the value of Bitcoin? Workers verify transactions because they get paid in something that they value. If the value of Bitcoin drops (say: government regulation), then the incentive to mine/verify goes away?

Assuming that happens and the miners go away, wouldn't the ledger be open to malicious attack?