Thanks for your replies. So where does the 10 minute block time fit into this?
Well in an ideal situation it SHOULD take 10 minutes per block. At the moment it's at nearly 30 minutes per block, so it currently takes nearly 3 times as long for transactions and payouts to process as it should. This in turn scares people away towards other faster altcoins, which in turn lowers the hashrate further, increasing the time taken per block, rinse repeat.
Currently it's 26 minutes per block, meaning that even with the reduced 60 block confirmation time for payments on some pools, you're still looking at just over 26 hours for payments. Hell even at the expected 10 minutes per block, it would take 10 hours for payments even at only 60 confirmations.
People are seeing these numbers, comparing it to other coins like DOGE (1 minute block time at around 80 confirmations for payments, or 80 minutes) or even MOON (90 second block time at ~50 confirmations, or 75 minutes) and simply shrug and move on.
One of five things will happen at this rate:
1. Whoever is manipulating prices on Cryptsy gives up, or at least allows the price to increase. He/they are probably the biggest reason for the prices staying so low (difficulty has increased nearly 3x yet prices are about the same as the other day). At the moment the entire market price for CAT across the board is being dictated by one or two of the earliest miners who were around at the coin's launch.
2. Someone with massive hashrates (perhaps a larger pool like Multipool for example) needs to turn their attention to CAT. Unfortunately given the absurdly low prices, it's far more profitable at the moment to simply mine DOGE and trade for CAT if you really want to gain CAT.
3. The coin itself might need to be changed to have a smaller retarget time (resulting in a hard fork, which has an extremely high chance of killing the coin altogether, as it would be delisted from Cryptsy and half of the reason people are interested in this coin to begin with is the fact that it's the Scrypt Bitcoin).
4. Demand suddenly jumps 10x, demolishing the 2500+ CAT sell orders on Cryptsy and allowing the price to rise naturally. At this point that's simply not going to happen.
5. Miners keep leaving, block time keeps increasing, the difficulty never decreases, transactions end up taking days or even weeks to process, and the coin for all intents and purposes, dies.
People keep saying that promotion is all the coin needs, but I think you are underestimating how much demand we'd need to generate to destroy the sell walls on Cryptsy.
I think getting worried about a coin that's been up for 3 days on Cryptsy is a bit overdoing it.
There are hundreds of thousand of coins being dumped. This is no surprise and has happened with EVERY coin released.
Someone is buying all the coins. They are buying them for a reason. We will all learn that reason soon enough.
If the coin was in trouble no one would be buying up everyones sells. There are multiple people buying EVERYTHING that has been sold.
Because there is no miner's dumping on the coin it is easier to skyrocket it.
There are really no sell walls on CAT compared to other coins. It's like 7 BTC all the way to 120000. That is 1/10th of a day's volume on a holiday mind you.
ZET and QRK were easy to skyrocket in the past because miners cannot sell into the buy walls.
CAT is producing low coins ... only 1% or 10,000 per day. Perfect to pump up.
Anyways.. 2 of the last 3 days has seen selling and drops on most coins. This is no surprise.
