Topic: could alternate blockchains be driving the btc price down? (Read 1858 times)

In my opinion,I am beginning to see the effects of how having a large no of competing blockchains can affect Bitcoin value.All I've seen is a steady constant drop,with bursts of rising to over $9 then back into freefall again.

I remember trying to get involved in speculation a while ago but it's too late for me in the speculating game now. I once cashed in £74 into 11.11BTC hoping to profit more, than 2 weeks of mining would have gotten me.Needless to say,the plan backfired as the moment I tried to sell,my payments were held in 'limbo' on the exchange I'm using because the value dropped so significantly shortly afterwards (Once the order is placed,the exchange auto sells when the value reaches parity to the market value I sold at on the Day.If this isn't the case,it stays in limbo til it does,however nothing gets lost so it looks certain to get my money back despite being in limbo)

After the speculating finished,I then discovered that I can make more bitcoins by mining Solid coins (a week ago) and then exchange them for BTC,but since then,2 things have happened:
1.Its 50/50 with the SC as the value has since dropped quite a bit but easier to mine now thanks to difficulty drop (from 22,500 to 12,500)
2.BTC and SC both continue to drop in value (however SC bounces back often with small increases at least once a day form my experience so far.)
however,despite these little niggles so far,I have managed to make 2x more than mining BTC directly ever gave me (and probably even more thanks to the difficulty drop with SC recently)
for mining 17hrs a day (24/7 is unfeasible fpr me at the moment)

So now,I'm not sure what to make of the idea of P2P currencies.The value should be expected to fluctuate (because thats life and how economies tend to work afaics) but the factors that affect the value happen too easily and too quickly (hacked exchange,mybitcoin issues,e.t.c).I did wonder if people who wanted to profit made hopeful speculations to boost the currency's  (well I'm trying to figure out how the bankers got away with it so easily) value. I do wonder how a viable alternative e-currency would survive (by probably going against the whole decentralised ideal and introducing some centralised form of trust, for transaction handling but that probably wouldn't survive beyond a few years, as we've seen with other e-currencies due to breach of trust issues if an exchange gets hacked or money gets stolen by hackers)

Doom despair and death

Ix coin and the Zimbabwe dollar have reached parity

My hardware is paid off too; anything at this point is gravy. It obviously is more fun to sell at 10-15-20-30 than it is at 8$, but, hell, it's 30-40 bucks more a day than I'd be making otherwise.

I'm not ready to sell my hardware just yet. I have a rig with 2x 6870's which has paid for itself. I'm actually one of those people who are buying up cheap 5830's because now I can put THOSE in my mining rig and use my dual 6870's in my gaming rig 

I've done the math and with my monthly power costs (flat $0.091 kw/h), as long as the price stays above $3.50, I'll turn a profit on the mining rig. So sure, the 5830's aren't going to pay for themselves in two weeks like the good old days of the bubble, but it's still very very possible for them to earn their money back over 1-2 months.

There's still money to be made in the long game, even with super low prices, for people who've already been in the game for at least a couple months. It doesn't make sense to make a LARGE "out of pocket" investment in bitcoin mining because it could take YEARS to pay off. So the gold rush days are long gone, but there's still money to be made.

People need to think of bitcoin mining like any other commodity mining/harvesting business. Most of the time in raw materials the profit margin is razor thin, look at small business logging/mining.

This has been a winning strategy in a bear bitcoin market.  The medium term (3 months) trend has not reversed, and isn't showing any signs of reversing.  I also sell as I mine, but I try to time the market.  That hasn't been quite as optimal as daily sales, but still a far far FAR FAR better outcome than mine, hold & pray.

Now that BTC is under $10 (and slowly drifting down) I don't bother trying to optimize or even sell every day.  At this point it's once again a gamble for double or nothing.  I'm happy to have sold a few at 11 and change, and should have more by the time we see that kind of pricing again. 

Also, my 5830s are listed on craiglist (if I get $120/ea it'll be a better return than the $ amount of coins they'll mine after power costs) because I'm not as optimistic about a rally before the ATI 7 series and/or consumer FPGA or ASIC miners are announced.  Once (if?) they sell I'll be able to claim a 300% return on my bitcoin investment in 3 months!  Sexy.

People are stupid. I can certainly see people doing something that stupid.

I don't think it's "omfg end of the month gotta pay rent" either, though. I mine (I could care less about day trading), and as I get coins, I instantly sell them. Why? Because, frankly, as unstable as it is, I'd rather get ~9$ today than have a chance of it going to 2$ tomorrow. Even if I "lose", my coin might have been worth 12$ instead of 9$, if it swings violently upwards. Oh well.

The curious thing about the 'rent due at end of month, bitcoin down' theory is that it assumes most people pay rent on or around the 1st of every month.  Mine is due on the 9th, and I know other people with payments sprinkled throughout the month.  I don't buy the theory.

The other thing is bitcoin is so far a nerd's and geek's playground.  People living pay cheque to pay cheque are unlikely to be involved at the moment, and certainly not willing to fork out a few thousand dollars on computer hardware while they're struggling to pay rent. 

we dont need sites, we need official tools to make them, like pushpool, but official, posted on the main page and giving support to set it up.

Bitcoin needs an official and open-source Market API in php for web and forums.

We've also had way too many people going "OH SHIT ME GONNA GET RICH!!!" and buying up 5830s because they thought $30 bitcoins meant they'd be worth hundreds each by six weeks ago...

I personally know a few people who dumped a lot more of their cash into rigs than was actually wise and are now a bit strapped... I can easily see a bunch of those people going "Damnit, rent's due next week, time to sell some coins" ... putting it off all month hoping for the price to skyrocket, then selling when they have to.

We may see fewer nerve-wracking spikes once the get-rich-quick miners either bail, recover, or learn their lesson.

i not buying the end of the month thing, we've had plenty of month ending rallys.

LOL! Gesh.. End of the month. Miners selling to pay bills = more BTC for sale than people buying. More supply than demand = price drop.

What happened to the Bitwillet and Bitcoinhop projects?

i dont think it its the extra blockchains, the main problem now is that bitcoin is unusable.

Satoshi when created the Bitcoin forgot the more important think, programming web-supported APIs and front ends to use it, he give us the coins, and the method to mine them, but not the tools to use it.

First off, we need a market plugin for use in all type of forums, so you can sell and buy things in those bitcoin enabled forums, and finally another market plugin for web pages.

And those markets plugin must support auto-price adjust and auto-BTC sell on market as fast you get them.

After all of that is done, you need to create all the security measures to make all of that safe, and the codes must be free and opensource.


Whiout all of that, Bitcoins can never have a real market use on internet.

I doubt the other blockchains have much to do with it. A lot of money that was on the market pulled out without purchasing anything, leaving no support.

im wondering if these alternate blockchains are driving down btc's price...

it seems a lot of people were making major btc mining the other blockchains (some people on the forum are claiming to have made @400 btc in a day of mining ix/io coins)...i would imagine that a decent percentage cashed/are cashing out the easy btc they made on the other blockchains...

enough people selling starts a downward trend, the downward trend turns into a panic sale.

its just a guess, and i could be wrong (since there has been a pretty steady overall downtrend since the bubble popped at 30) but i wouldnt discount it..... what do you guys think?