Topic: Current Bitcoin inflation rate = 35%. Price = stable (Read 11518 times)

Irregardless is a pretty silly word though in the sense that it literally means exactly the opposite of what you intend it to mean though.

Whilst 'irregardless' might not be a word in a known dictionary, the mere utterance of the non-word word in a constructed sentence that conveys a comprehension of its intent into an understanding of what is being communicated suffices.

Ain't was a non-word word that became a word because of excessive use of the word. So, irregardless of the arguments, it might just be a non-word word that is waiting for inclusion into the great grammatical dictionaries of the time.

Sorry to be a grammar nazi, but everyone here is trying SO HARD to sound smart, and the use of the word irregardless just destroys it in my mind.  Sorry to pick on you DeathAndTaxes, others here have done it too.  Can we please agree that irregardless is not a word?

How quaint.

sorry for offtopic, but good keyboards are still expensive. I'm currently looking at keyboards and the ones that I like and fit my specs are in the range of $100 to $170.

It doesn't have the last couple years worth of data, but http://www.westegg.com/inflation/ gives this:
"What cost $10 in 2010 would cost $0.39 in 1900."

There's one selling for about 2 BTC (equivalent) here: http://cheshirehorse.com/Buggy-Whip-P6374.aspx

I wonder how that compares to the inflation-adjusted buggy-whip price in 1900...

Not my helicopter.



I suppose we should make the use of the word 'healthy'.  Again, what did the last Buggy Whip sell for?  But, yes the price is more determined by the willingness of the buyer to buy rather than the seller to sell. (Supply Side economics only works if people want what your selling).

Actually, on the decimal placement, yes I have. What other currency places the decimal so high above the base unit. To the left would hurt it, imo. To the right wouldn't do much or might even help it a little. Luckily the clients now allow for the movement of the placement with growth of the economy. You can move it to the right.


Now let me get back to drunk flying. You know, you don't get pulled over up here.

I see several possible explanations:

• After the 2011 bubble burst, a lot of disgruntled speculators ditched Bitcoin and sought refuge in the safety of leveraged AAPL ETFs instead.
• 95% of the node activity was due to miners (who else keeps the software running 24-7, sheesh) and most of them gradually dropped out when they could no longer mine profitably at such high difficulty vs. price.
• The data is collected from an old version of the client, and most people have now upgraded and/or use e-wallets as suggested above.

You cover a lot material, BTC_Bear. Where do I start?


What if each bitcoin were incredibly valuable?


Breathalyze Ben Bernanke and take away his helicopter keys? j/k

In a normal market, the price is the point where the supply and demand curves meet. To achieve a lower price, you would have to:
1) make [whatever it is that you're talking about] seem crappier, less appealing,
2) increase supply,
or 3) both 1 and 2.
However, with Bitcoin the supply is extremely inelastic, which means (ignoring hoarding and other short-term manipulations for the moment) that the exchange rate is almost entirely controlled by the demand, or in other words: it's in the mind of the buyer. Have you considered that if the Bitcoin developers had decided to put the decimal point 1 digit further to the left, the price might still be $5 instead of $50? IMO it's bad enough with only 21 million coins, but with only 2.1 million coins to go round, why should anyone be $45 more serious about a toy currency like that?

Agreed,

 That is the steps needed before the national chains adopt it. Small Businesses could stand to have the most benefits from BTC. Once that starts en masse tho... the chains will quickly adapt to a B2B market of them and quickly followed by a B2P market.

I hesitate to call this off-topic since, now that the price is stable, large-scale adoption is the next step.  But I'll just point out that a nationwide retailer is the wrong place to look.  It would be nice, but I just don't see any of them having the balls to do it.  Instead, look for mom-and-pop shops, local barter groups and, eventually, cities and states.  These are the only entities that can stand up to the expected retaliation of the federal government for adopting an alternative currency.  Large scale retailers, especially publicly-traded ones, don't really have a lot to gain by adopting Bitcoin.

Good rant, valid concerns.

The issue of concentration via ASIC mining isn't as great a concern as other technical aspects, though. Even if a CPU-friendly algorithm were used, that just means economy of scale will emerge for whomever can pull together more/faster processors in bulk rather than better custom chip design. Actually, ASIC mining can help to guard against some threats such as botnets and traditional bank/government aggression.

Same problem, different approach. Defending against malicious domination requires eternal vigilance.

   It is a concern of mine. However, remember this is a niche economy, so far, and even the high figure isn't that much. So the swings can seem large when dealing with such small numbers. e.g. 2-1=1 represents a 50% decrease but really doesn't mean that much as tomorrow it can easily do the opposite.

  This is a ßeta project still but people are relying on it as money. I laugh when people make fun of 'early' adopters cause 'they' are early adopters. Yes, someone else might have 20K BTC compared to their 100 BTC. But 100 BTC in the grand scheme would be a multi-millionaire if 9 billion people were using the 21 Million Bitcoins in an economy. Although, I'm shooting for just 100 to 300 million people.

 A problem is people are saving to much. Robber Barons, ponzi schemes, pyramid schemes, real businesses, etc... It is interesting to see the 'new' economy act just like the 'old' economies. The key is that we've seen it happen before and there is an element of predictability in what will happen. The time frame and where are the questions.

 This is the first currency that has potential to become a 'world' currency. It is also its greatest threat. The 'Big Boys' will either try to kill it or co-opt it if it becomes to much a threat. That needs to be guarded against.

 Currently a very small amount of BTC, relatively, controls the market price.

Assuming each node represents 1 person (which it doesn't), that would be about 8 Million / 18,000 for about 444 BTC each on a MTGOX volume for 30 days. But as said, it doesn't because people run more than 1 node and not every trade is unique on the exchange.

We are a baby economy that needs nursing.  There is a term for the period that we are in. But I will not coin it here. However, two things happen from it. It either breaks out or collapses.

The older generation will just not get it. Look towards the schools and gaming segment of this economy. Get college students to buy Pizza and kids to pay for games in BTC.  And with a little time, someone big will accept it. i.e. Dominos, GameStop, etc...

Plan for the worst, hope for the best.

I get some grief because I would like to see the price between 1.7 to 3 USD. In the long run, I think this price point will help the spread of BTC but the 'market' (miners) don't like that point.  Miners need to be-careful that they don't get what they wish for. Their fishing of Blue Fin Tuna might turn into Pogie Fishing.

Miner bitch about the cost of mining and they need a certain price point. NO, they don't. The lower price would put miners out of business lowering the difficulty and making it easier (cheaper) for the remaining miners to mine.

I believe the original intent of Satoshi was for distributed mining among all clients. This has changed and now mining is becoming centralized based on whom is the most efficient and stays in business. I believe, every client should be 'easily' be able to mine but a control of how much should be left to the individual.  As I see it now, the first people to ASIC farms will win and slowly but surely put the others out of business. The client could prevent the soon to come ASIC Hubs from exerting a unbalance force on the network by letting people just bypass them. i.e. P2Pool among just other clients and avoid the ASIC Hubs altogether.


Bah... I ranted again.

So this doesn't look good?

This whole forum is full of statisticians that will tell you how to account for outliers.

Also, unless it's something like "different nodes seen in the last week" it wouldn't account for people like me who only run the Bitcoin client long enough to catch up on the blockchain and the occasional transaction.

http://bitcoinstatus.rowit.co.uk/hosts.html

http://p2pool.info/

It's not really that great because it doesn't account for all the tens of thousands of online wallets secured by exchanges and ewallet service providers.

  ... damn nervous tic

The miners keep mining and creating new coins. Hence: inflation. The approximate rate is pre-defined by the Bitcoin system. I eventually settled on the Austrian "asshat" definition. If you read the whole saga, it's pretty self-explanatory.

Where can we get info on the number of Bitcoin nodes in use? That sounds like a great metric.

OK, let's try some logistic regression analysis here:
Conclusion, independent on what bitcoin is doing, decrease in nodes is bad!