There weren't many coins on offer between 0.51 and 0.95, so I think it's a bit early to break out the parity champagne quite yet.

[edit: if someone buys 691 coins now, it will take the MtGox price up to $1.25]

Seems like a Mt. Gox bug.

It's not good for the BitCoin economy. It makes it obvious that BitCoin is not really a stable currency and that single actors can significantly move the market. Wild, unpredictable fluctuations in exchange rate make business hard and make BitCoin seem flaky.

What we really need to be measuring is the GDP of the BitCoin economy, but that's hard to figure out as we don't really know which transactions in the block chain represent "real" trade and which are simply moving or consolidating coins. It'd be nice if there was some kind of way people could voluntarily mark transactions as "real" by some informal definition so we could estimate the GDP of the economy.

I've been watching the "Asks" coming back, trickling in and gradually bringing the lowest offer back down from 0.95 to 0.64 and still dropping. I guess it will end up close to 0.50 again. I wonder if most of these are automatically or manually generated.

I was wondering if there might be some manipulation of Mt. Gox prices today since it's the day that counts for the end-of-January bets that were placed on BitcoinSportsBook by the end of December. Someone could perhaps even play both sides of a trade at a particular volume to try to influence the "official" number of what the end-of-month value was.

Well, if that is so, that someone would have probably lost a fair amount of coins in the process, I guess. The .4 bet was already 'in the bag', and the total over .5 pot amount to 450 coins, give or take. Assuming that more than one person has placed bets, the potential gain is relatively small.

If Bitcoin is successful and there is adoption by millions of users, a huge increase in value, perhaps 1000-fold, is unavoidable.

Such a strong rally is desirable for a fixed supply currency because it indicates increase in adoption.

Also, the higher the value, the more difficult it becomes for a single actor to move the market.

As for wild, unpredictable fluctuations, this can be solved trivially with currency hedging and futures trading. Some are working on offering these services. Just give it some time. It's still early days.



 

No, maybe a rich kid wanted to get his hand into some goodies offered here. He might had just buy a lot(Like 10K USD) and the price spiked. It is going to fall under 0.65 soon. xD

Actually, at the moment on MTGox there are several thousand bitcoins available for sale.  However the vast majority of them are selling for $1