Very slowly.  You need to study the current order book on multiple exchanges and calculate the price impact vs. sell rate of your coins.  Optimize to maximize the dollars you generate.

@mrbigg - Not nonsense at all. 

The mining of BTC is based on the concept of doing work.  If it takes more "work" to produce BTC, then they should be worth more.  At the very least, the lower bound on price should be the cost of electricity plus the amortized cost of hardware.  However, the introduction of ASIC rigs has skewed things as they use much less power and produce much more output per dollar cost.

Many people have postulated that the price can be tracked as a function of the difficulty factor.  I investigated and found that not to be true.

You are technically correct, it is a new BLOCK that is generated every 10 minutes.

However, that doesn't change my conclusion:  The is very little correlation between price and difficulty.

Price is determined by the public agreeing on what they think a Bitcoin is worth - nothing else.

New article up on the bitcoin Math blog.  How does mining difficulty relate to price:
http://btcmath.com/2013/06/bitcoin-price-as-a-function-of-difficulty/

Matlab is fine, but I still prefer R.

Besides, R is free, and very heavily supported by a huge and helpful community.

My blog is:  www.btcmath.com

Is it possible to change my username?

Thanks

Watch the full video on Youtube

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l03tgnC59I

Happy to discuss or answer any questions.

Hello,

I'm been playing with the awesome trading tool by prof7bit, goxtool.

I'd like to add some trendlines (moving average, and a few of my own proprietary indicators.)  But don't know Python well enough to do that. 
Can someone help me figure out how to add a panel (or whatever its called) where I can plot a trendline that parallels the same timeframe as the big barchart?

Thanks!

Technical analysis is just a bunch of malarkey.  Never proven under rigorous academic study.

Awesome job!

There are much better tools in Python for MtGox.

Interesting premise.  I wonder if it will gain enough popularity to be self sustaining?

What's your rationale for that prediction?

Satoshi built this into the system to account for advances in technology.  No matter what crazy innovations come out in the future, having a difficulty factor will ensure the steady, controlled growth of BTC.

TheSpiral got it right.

One of the many things I do is work on financial models, algorithmic trading, portfolio optimization, etc.  "Quant" is just a fancy term that encompasses all that stuff.

Hello,

I'm a Quant, Statistician, and Data Scientist.  Almost done with my PhD in statistics and am looking forward to applying my knowledge to the Bitcoin world.

I'm starting to develop an analysis of Bitcoin market micro-structure and would appreciate any insight that people have.

Thanks!