The following is why short of someone seriously manipulating the prices upward, CATcoin will continue its death spiral. There are many die hard optimists in this thread who don't use logic and invest purely based on emotion or some arbitrary libertarian ideal. Those people will say things along the lines of "The difficulty retarget and block times are perfect because it's the same as bitcoin" or "CAT is an alternative to bitcoin which is more decentralized and combats the increasing levels of bitcoin regulation by governments". In reality, however, CAT is not operating under the same environment as BTC and treating them the same is a mistake:
When BTC was this young, it was the first and only crypto out there. There was no option to mine other coins if the difficulty got too high or sites such as coinwarz which told you the most profitable coin to mine at any given time. Multipools did not exist and there wasn't even an exchange where people could trade the coins they mined that told them what is the market price at the time. Therefore the concept of a huge number of miners bringing difficulty up and then bailing when the difficulty has retargeted was not a big fear. Now that BTC has ASICs, this is even less of a concern since miners who own the ASICs can't do anything else with them. Even if the price tanks, as long as they earn more than the electricity costs, they will keep mining.
CAT does not have this luxury. CAT exists in an extremely competitive environment where it must attract both investors and miners from all the other altcoins, more of which come out every day. Saying CAT is fine just cause it's the same specs as BTC is ignorant and deluded. In the end, coin prices are determined by supply and demand. While supply is indeed shrinking due to the lack of miners, the unfortunate thing is the demand is also shrinking due to the extremely high block times. Many on this thread claim that promotion will fix the problem but last night I attempted to transfer some CAT and each confirmation took nearly 3 hours. Of course this is an unusually long time even for the current hash rate but it demonstrates just how bad the problem is. How do you promote such a crypto? Who will use a coin that takes this long to confirm?It's use even in a gambling site is questionable as it takes half an hour to send in your CAT and half an hour to retrieve your winnings. Why would you roll the dice with CAT when doge can do it in 2 minutes?
Unfortunately, I already know I am going to get reamed by the die hard CAT fanboys here for posting this but the points I make are still valid and nobody who has responded to my posts in the past have actually addressed my concerns with logical arguments. Of course it's still possible that through manipulation, CAT can recover through this current difficulty level as someone artificially raises the price. However, I am not willing to gamble on that chance and have sold all my CATs. Even if this happens, the cycle will just repeat itself again at the next retarget anyways.
In the past I have indicated that the only way to save CAT is a hard fork which decreases block times to 1 minute and changes difficulty retarget to roughly once every 24 hrs. This was received poorly by the community. Perhaps the community will be more willing to consider it once it takes 1-2hrs average for a block and the price is at 0.0002. Maybe then I'd be willing to reinvest in CAT again.
+1 agreed.
however, a proposal to hard-fork the currency after a week of mining and trading? that will trash remaining confidence in the coin, and people will move on to this week's meme (i guess it's cagecoin).
as long as cat remains one of the least profitable coins to mine, i cannot justify spending resources to prop it up. right now i can mine doge, and trade it for 3x cat in USD everyday.
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