Silk Road forums

Here's another theory about this sell off that I came across:

An insider email was leaked onto r/bitcoin a couple weeks ago. Basically a group of rogue traders on Tor organizes a planned DDOS of MtGox at a specific date and time - thus locking out everyone from creating new trades - while simultaneously creating a sell off over 4 hours. The fact that no new trades can be created combined with the price dropping precipitously causes a panic, which grows. At the height of the panic, they buy back in (because they are the ones controlling the DDOS, so they get to make the profitable trades). Everyone else loses their ass who reads the price manipulation as true market price and panics. More people need to understand this because no one is actually panicking at first; it's price manipulation through the DDOS dropping the price, not actual mass sell off. Still people just blindly look at the price of MtGox and don't consider this as a possibility even though it's happened frequently over the last few months. Information is power.

Panic! Fire and brimstone coming down from the sky! Rivers and seas boiling!  Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes!  The dead rising from the grave!  Human sacrifice! Dogs and cats, living together! Mass hysteria!

Pretty much every exchange is suffering massive lag right now, but MtGox is getting hit the worst. If SR gets its 24 hour average from the MtGox API, that would explain why it hasn't be updated in a while.

The blockchain website? does it go down a lot, because I'm waiting for a transfer for some time now...

Not the web site. The actual block chain, after which blockchain.info is named.

It went from $266 to $156. Hell of a sell off, even in relative terms.

The market is fucking whacked right now. $36 bid-ask spread, usually it's less than a dollar. Price is jumping all around. This will take a while to get settled.

Looks like it's time for our weekly panic / sell off. The price just dropped $50, although that's 20% of the peak value, so by relative magnitude it's not the biggest drop we've experienced. Then again, it may not be over yet. Is this an excellent time to buy? So hard to tell.

I think it would make sense to start accepting LTC on SR. Each vendor could get the option to accept them or not. But it would take some of the heat of off BTC and kick-start the sales again on SR.

That's actually an interesting idea. They could offer an in-house BTC-LTC exchange and vendors could opt to sell only in LTC. After a big burst a week ago, its price has been relatively stable in the last week. Then again, that may be a temporary thing. Since it's a smaller market, it may go through much bigger fluctuations eventually.

Price of BTC seems to be levelling off no?

Trading volume has decreased. Most people are done for the day.  Go here:

http://bitcoinity.org/markets

Click the "24h" link in the top left the top graph. See the purple bars? That's trading volume. See how high it was when the price was increasing. We're at maybe 1/5 of the volume now.