BTC was up 50% in a month before the auction was announced. Then insiders stopped buying, dumping began and a couple of days later the auction was announced.
A lot of the people that were buying and/or planning to buy will now be participating in the auction. All the losers will carry on buying on the exchanges as they were doing before the auction was announced.
BTC > $2000 by September.
-Never- use an absolute. All the losers will not be buying on the exchanges. I'm participating with a group through SecondMarket for the auction. We semi-low balled our bid. If we get some coin, great! If not, that's ok, most of us are happy with what we already own and will probably not be purchasing more.
Downside of their auction is we needed to submit our bid by noon yesterday, non-SecondMarket bids due noon today, price has climbed $15/coin since then so our offer even a bit lower than we anticipated.. I'm guessing we won't get any coins, but hey, no harm no foul for making a bid!
I don't think bids will be made public but I'm willing to reveal our bid after the results on Monday are released so we can get a general idea of what bids were or were not accepted.
AFAIK bids need to be submitted by 6pm EST today. Price is going up today, I assume someone is bidding above the current market price (all it takes is one bid). If that is the case, it makes sense that the price is going up today whilst the auction is underway.