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Comment by gigq | Hacker News Reader

With everyone anticipating an even bigger crash and given all the bad news in May it's surprising bitcoin has remained relatively stable.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/31/w...

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It's the same cycle Bitcoin has been in for the past few years. The price is stable, but when the hype train starts running it goes on a ride for a month or so until it runs out of steam, and the price eventually stabilizes again. This is a good time to buy.

What a surprisingly naive post from Timothy! The reason these events did not affect Bitcoin's price is simply because they are all (except 1) affecting mostly the US market, wich is a tiny fraction of the worldwide Bitcoin market.

As to the Coinlab vs. MtGox lawsuit, people know that these companies care about Bitcoin above anything else, so they won't let the lawsuit affect it. Eg. if people started panic-selling, you can bet they would work a settlement to stop the panic.

> What a surprisingly naive post from Timothy! The reason these events did not affect Bitcoin's price is simply because they are all (except 1) affecting mostly the US market, wich is a tiny fraction of the worldwide Bitcoin market.

While there is a clear trend towards globalization of Bitcoin underway, the USA historically and currently, dominates the lion's share of the market. [1][2]

[1] http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/countryHostsMonth.png

[2] http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-27/mapping-bitcoins-gl...

[1] is grossly outdated: it was last updated in Oct 2012:

  $ HEAD http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/countryHostsMonth.png
  [...]
  Last-Modified: Sun, 21 Oct 2012 05:05:27 GMT

Things change quickly in the Bitcoin world. Stats that are 8 months old are absolutely not a good indicator of today.

And indeed, [2], which is from this week, directly contradicts [1]: it shows that the share of Bitcoin nodes located in the USA is only 20% (and has been dwindling). China already equated or surpassed the USA (they are also at 20%).

> the US market, wich is a tiny fraction of the worldwide Bitcoin market

How do you come to this conclusion? Take a look at the volume on bitcoincharts. mtgoxUSD is beating the pants off everything in terms of volume. It also loses tons of volume after the seizure on the 17th. This is pretty consistent with the idea that most BTCers are in the United States (most of the exchange volume is BTC<>USD) and their behavior changed drastically right when Dwolla was seized (the volume died after the 17th).

"How do you come to this conclusion?"

1. Why do you equate mtgoxUSD to the US market? The majority of MtGox customers trading USD are non-americans.

2. Only ~20% of the Bitcoin connected nodes are located in the USA: http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-05-27/mapping-bitcoins-gl...

3. Only ~9% of the world internet users are americans, making the USA a tiny market with respect to the potential future of Bitcoin.

4. bitcoincharts exclude many foreign exchanges (metabank in Russia, where Bitcoin is HUGE), all private trades (eg. Avalon claimed they sold all the bitcoins they needed to sell to build their 110nm ASIC at TSMC, to private buyers in China; the fact they were able to do this with no pb just tells you how big private trading is in China), etc.

> The majority of MtGox customers trading USD are non-americans

So why does their volume drop off after the 17th? That's the reason why I brought that up - only Americans are effected by the Dwolla closure.

A lawsuit over who owns MtGox's US-focused business can be viewed as a bullish signal – people fight more over valuable things.

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