On Sunday night, Betabeat blundered into #bitcoin-pit, an IRC channel “for professional trading,” and found a surprising number of Wall Street professionals, in

On Sunday night, Betabeat blundered into #bitcoin-pit, an IRC channel “for professional trading,” and found a surprising number of Wall Street professionals, including “Bill,” who declined to give his name but proved his employment the next day with a furtive call from an empty conference room at Credit Suisse. He had just sold 400 Bitcoins, he told Betabeat, which he planned to buy back in the morning. Given that the third-largest Bitcoin exchange, Bitomat.pl, had just accidentally deleted the 17,000 BTC it had in deposits at the same time another popular Bitcoin service shut down—possibly because its owner decided it was time to take the money and run—Bill was betting the price would be right. “Bitcoin is like Wall Street was 15 to 20 years ago when I entered,” he said. “Fragmented markets, wide spreads, manipulation, the trading stone ages.”