As everyone here probably knows, I am a long term bull attempting to multiply my bitcoins by trading this bubble, which compels me to adopt bearish tactics as the opportunity presents.

When traders say that bitcoin has passed from weak hands to strong ones, they are describing a mechanism that prolongs a bubble collapse.

Certain traders holding losing positions (the weak hands) stop-loss sell to new buyers who can withstand a bit of a drop (the strong hands), until the latter in turn sell as they become the weak hands - right?

I believe that the bubble collapse will take the approximately the same duration as the bubble expansion phase - approximately three months. Plenty of time for more capitulations before the final bottom of this bubble - I think.

Ask sum slowly creeping down

Slow and steady rise for the past 3 days.

Bit boring watching the price right now.

There hardly seems to be any selling. The 124 is relentlessly being pursued. Quite a bit of resistance around 122. Little resistance around 124 - 125, just bears sitting there waiting to be eaten.

I think not much is going to change until late afternoon.

A few months ago I wrote a Java websocket/socket.io client for Mt. Gox that processes the depth chart to explore my notions about depth and tick data. The ChartBuddy 3-D depth chart periodically posted here shows the time dimension like I wanted - so no point in going further. But I did learn enough about the Mt. Gox API to very deeply appreciate the cleverness employed by Clark Moody who ties together Mt. Gox trades and depth changes.

The Mt. Gox HTTP API allows the client to poll the server in order to obtain partial or the full depth list of bids and asks. Then its websocket/socket.io API allows the client to subscribe to trades, depth changes, and lag. Subsequently the client receives notification of depth changes, which is the change and new amount of the limit bid or ask orders at a certain price at a certain time, i.e. the time the limit order was issued/cancelled. What is crazy is that Mt. Gox drops the connection, or otherwise loses synchronization between the trades and the depth chart. Clark Moody's realtime charting app dynamically fixes all this up. Its not precise - but it is very satisfactory, by polling the server to replace the client depth info when it gets out of sync.

I can answer detailed protocol questions about the Mt. Gox API as regard to charting data, but not much at all regarding the trading functions.

I say 150

I would feel even more confident about my bitcoin bubble assumptions if the price did not exceed $145 again before the final bottom.

I pretty much agree with you again. If we go again to $160 I would be puzzled. Heck, I think the normal thing would be not going over $125 before the final bottom.

I also like $125'ish for the top ... I just don't trust this rally at all and am not convinced it's got much more life in it