Quote from: MatTheCat on March 04, 2014, 01:06:14 AM

Yeah.

I was going to reply something along those lines but the sheer exercise in futility of it all bored me into not completing my post.

As a means of everyday payment, it is fucking rubbish.

As a means of moderately wealthy people from crisis hit nations/economies, getting their capital into an ultra transportable form without necessarily having access to international finance. It is the perfect fit. A temporary fit for most perhaps, but temporary is better than the chances of watching all your capital turn into empty government promises as the geo-political games of NATO and Putin wipe the floor with the Ukrainian economy.

I don't understand the full implications of how it makes sense to Ukrainians....perhaps they fear their currency will collapse? But this must be the reason why Bitcoin has done what it has done today. Mentalists like rpietila may claim that this all fits in perfectly with his exponential growth mean curve, but up until 6.30 am GMT, All technicals were pointing towards Bitcoin taking another nose dive. Instead, this X-Factor came into play and blew all the TA out the water. Not even the bulls promoting their flimsy inverse head n shoulders formation could have predicted this.

I have said many times that I believe that Bitcoin was actually developed by the NSA as a financial weapon of mass destruction and I think these kind of events demonstrates exactly the uses that a reasonably liquid Bitcoin market could have in undermining the economies of nations whose resources and strategic potential the US and it's NATO bum buddies are interested in having a piece of.

I doubt that todays pump had much to do with Ukraine.
There is a 1000 per day bank withdrawal limit, but that's just to avoid bank runs. You can still exchange to other fiat or make international bank transfers. It wouldn't be exactly a smart choice to go from 1 fragile currency to another just as fragile or more.
My guess goes that it's some outsider investment group that decided to copy Fortress, so they made a high risk bet and bought a planned amount of coins. Todays rise was caused by one entity who was rather careless about buying coins. You could often see pumps like these during the China boom. Pumps that are ok with buying coins in a short period and creating a drastic rise. Buys like these are made by people who are not interesting in hanging around at the bitcoin market for a long time. They only come to buy a determined amount, that was agreed upon by the board of directors.