I don't think miners are happy with the price being so low. The difficulty increased by 50%, and the market still hasn't changed. A lot of miners are holding on BTC hoping that price will follow the difficulty since mining profitability has effectively halved.

Maybe I'm a noob here... but how are these figures relevant when there are "dark pools" which hide X amount of orders?

Furthermore, how many people just sit on the sidelines watching, without putting in formal bids? If I want to trade at X price, it doesn't mean I'll have a standing bid.

Seems that these are very big unknowns, no?

are you seriously taking into consideration the fact that you can see tradehills entire book vs a much smaller percentage of gox's?

also where are you getting TH has 4X the asks of gox?

Except difficulty follows price, not the other way around. The 50% difficulty increase is the lag behind the recent price rises. In two weeks if the price doesn't rise again the difficult will most probably drop.

Price can be affected by difficulty.  A miner who is now making half the number of bitcoins that he was two weeks ago may be less likely to sell at a particular price point.  It takes both a buyer AND a seller to make a trade, so something that affects the number of sellers at a particular price point can absolutely affect the price.

It's not the only factor in the price, nor even likely one of the larger factors, but it is undeniably A factor.

is this stable enough for you?

doctor, the patient is deceased.

I think the OP is a little misleading. As the mtgox crash showed us, there are hundreds of thousands of dollars sitting on the sidelines. If my memory serves me correctly, $1.3M worth of orders were filled by the sell off down to 0.01. Sure, some of that money may have moved, but I doubt that anyone was able to while mtgox was down. It is probably still there.

What's more, the mtgox depth chart does not nearly cover all orders. There are probably hundreds of thousands of dollars and at least tens of thousands of bitcoins in orders further out.

If 0.3% of the market was really setting prices, it would be entirely too easy to move funds into an exchange and shake these "market makers" out. If bitcoins were significantly overpriced, there would be an influx of bitcoins to exchanges and prices would drop.

The market is speaking, and we should listen.

Memory not acceptable as data. What I have shown is the entire book according to the above site. If you have a better source please share it.


There is faith in a higher price.

I'd also like to add that you're only analyzing the USD portion of a global economy. There is an obvious flaw in that logic.

Full order books are not publicly available. You're misinterpreting what IS made available.

Or do you really think that EUR, GBP, OTC transactions, and even SSL don't make the market?

I'll leave services and goods out of this, as they obviously have nothing to do with valuing a currency...

[EDIT]I was, perhaps, overzealous. I get worked up when I read that bitcoin is overvalued. [/EDIT]