Those numbers are fairly misleading.The Chinese exchanges volumes are somewhat fabricated. Check out the data on bitcoinity.org [1], which reports that 9.3 mill

Those numbers are fairly misleading.The Chinese exchanges volumes are somewhat fabricated. Check out the data on bitcoinity.org [1], which reports that 9.3 million BTC, or 98% of worldwide volume, were traded on Chinese exchanges in the past 24 hours. That would be 58% of all bitcoins currently in existence, traded on Chinese exchanges, in a single day. Clearly, that is not what is happening. My understanding is that these numbers are the result of zero fees, enabling self-trading (same person on both sides) to create false market signals, as well as rapid fire back and forth trading strategies. There is also some speculation that some Chinese exchanges directly manipulate the volume data in one way or another. I'm not sure exactly what the story is. And China may still very well be leading this current price wave. However, those volume numbers are very suspicious and should be taken with a large grain of salt. [1] http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=c&r=hour&t=bar http://data.bitcoinity.org/markets/volume/24h?c=c&r=hour&t=b... Update: In the past 15 minutes, while I finished writing this post, an additional 200k BTC were supposedly traded on Chinese exchanges. That would be approximately $250 million of trades at current prices, which is ridiculous.