332 BTC volume today on poloniex but almost no price movement. It's hard to make a case that it will go lower at this point, there is just no meaningful liquidity (25-50+btc) on the ask side without pushing the price up 15%.
Shapeshift.io just added XMR support and it looks like the database is one step closer. Development wise it looks like there are good things on the horizon.
Shapeshift announcement:
https://twitter.com/ShapeShift_io/status/585570515139563521Pull request to merge database into master:
https://github.com/monero-project/bitmonero/pull/256Interesting. So BTC -> ShapeShift XMR -> XMR.to = completely anonymous payments using BTC?
Timing-wise there are potential issues with that
1.123 BTC -> XMR -> 1.122 BTC over a short period of time might be fairly obvious. Of course it depends not the amounts and the level of activity on BTC at the time. If BTC has 1000 tx/sec that would be a lot more obscure than currently
Which is why, if you want to use this mechanic rather than just hold lots of XMR you'd want to hold a small buffer amount in XMR.
Then:
1.123 BTC -> XMR -> 1.355 BTC
.95 BTC -> XMR -> 1.11 BTC
2.11 BTC -> XMR -> 1.898 BTC
and so on...
See my previous reply. My understanding of the original suggestion was to send BTC to shapeshift, have shapeshift send XMR to XMR.to and then XMR.to sends BTC to where you want it. That's not likely to give a high degree of privacy at this point.