Bit o’ Bitcoin news.

So the Bitcoin Foundation’s vice-chair was just arrested for money laundering. With Bitcoin. 

Guess what that’s doing to prices at the moment?

Actually we do have another interesting tidbit. The markets at MTGox, the largest of the exchanges, had topped out over the weekend at around $1020 each and has dipped on the news to about $960. But then, as I’ve mentioned, there’s a lot of concern that Gox has been artificially inflating prices and propping up the currency. Since they’re the biggest exchange, they can control their reports in various ways: dummy orders to bump it up, misreporting, etc. There’s no financial regulator, which is the point of Bitcoin. And of course I have no proof, it’s just fishy as fuck to see that every time there’s a dip a steady stream of orders for the exact same .0100BTC size start cropping up for about $10 over the sinking rate…

But meanwhile if you check a site that reports on the other exchanges, the dip is far more noticeable. As you can see here:

image

In that shot you see the dip down to near $750, from $995 at a peak a few days ago. 

And MTGox is reporting prices over $200 higher than the other exchanges. Good times.