Topic: Out in the wild - people think Bitcoins will drop to 0 (Read 7541 times)

You can demand whatever price you like, doesn't mean there are a never ending line of people marching into the market to pay it. So you clutch those coins close to your chest, shrieking "I will make a profit, dammit", while the market marches ever farther south... how long until you give in and sell some off, or quit mining?

Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say the market will go down - but you should at least entertain the possibility if you're investing in Bitcoins. If you're mining and holding, you are investing in Bitcoins - you're exactly the same as the people who bought in except you buy in through a bigger power bill... hoping to christ the price comes back up so you can turn a profit just like everyone else.

Yeah you've sure got this market by the balls!

In a short to medium-term bear market: The 7,000+(?) coins mined each day are a huge burden for the Bulls to overcome. The "great wall @$25 soon gave birth to a great wall @$20."
Dropping as low as $2 or $5 is completely realistic, IMO.
Long-term optimism is fun, short-term realism is profitable if you "play your coins right."

Thats fine. But as a miner, if my hardware is paid off, I DO ... NOT ... HAVE to sell my coins.... EVER!

Miners don't control the price.....lol....you watch us if the price gets too low.

Yeah sure, but holy fuck once you get about a third of the way through that "article" you realize pretty quickly it's a thinly veiled press release.

GoldMoney completely rocks, but they are subject to all of the typical Know Your Customer laws, which make privacy impossible.

TL;DR: "Don't use Bitcoin, use GoldMoney (of which I'm an investor)".

Doug Casey of Casey Research is a highly intelligent, well-respected, level-headed, Libertarian wealthy investor.  He loathes government and loves free enterprise.  Here is what he had to say about Bitcoin

http://www.caseyresearch.com/cwc/doug-casey-bitcoin-and-currencies

Miners may DEMAND coins, but if they are not BUYING them then they do not affect the price. Your logic is broken. If I fire up my GPU miner and the difficulty increases accordingly, explain the causal chain that leads from this to a increased price.

There's nothing wrong with an unbacked currency if everyone understands the rules going in to it - instead of being backed by the bullets of a government (which is the only thing the USD is backed by anymore), Bitcoin is simply backed by the voluntary acceptance of it by others. The fact that there's a huge chunk of those "others" who are accepting it at what could be vastly inflated prices, based on the speculation that if it takes off "it's going to be huge" doesn't really say anything about an unbacked currency, it merely says something about those others' "investment" decision making process.

There is a tiny "economy" going on... a handful of businesses are accepting Bitcoins (at huge risk at the moment, due to the above-mentioned price factors), and there are several trading sites where people have actually sold shit to each other using Bitcoins. I've sold stuff using Bitcoins - it's nice to know that once I pass the finish line (USD in my bank account for me, I can't pay my bills in BTC), I don't have to worry about some shithead doing a chargeback on something I can't recover. To scoff and not call that an economy is just being stubborn and silly.

I think I know the other place you're discussing Bitcoin, and I'd just like to point out that it's detractors are for the most part, just as big tools as Bitcoin's biggest cheerleaders. 95% of that gargantuan thread is people making idiotic assertions that are patently false, that anyone who spent 5 minutes looking over the wiki would already understand are already addressed. But no, I enjoy reading 80 times a day "what's stopping satoshi from making more coins at random?" as much as you probably enjoy reading asshats talking about how Bitcoin will change the world if only someone else does the hard work of bootstrapping a real economy to match it's speculative worth (and don't even get me started on the - now thankfully thinning - libertarded approach to tax dodging using BTC as a selling point).

There are real, intelligent concerns to be had about Bitcoin's legitimacy as a real currency in the next decade or two (though hopefully not insurmountable, time will tell) - but if you guys think you're hitting the nail on the head with "hurr, not backed by anything", as I said, just as much tools as the BTC cheerleaders.

You say chicken, I say egg.

The reason I generally don't take sides in the argument "Does difficulty drive price, or does price drive difficulty?" is because I think it's both.

That's why I find it funny to see people so adamant that their view is 'correct' and the opposition's 'incorrect'.

- There are those of us who are holding on the the BTC we mine until the cows come home.  Those people do not affect the price.
- There are other miners who do sell BTC from time to time.  Chances are, they're out to make a certain profit on the equipment they purchased.  Those people do affect the price.  Their desire to sell at a certain price is based in part on the difficulty of mining those BTC, and the expectation of being able to recoup the sale through mining, given the current difficulty.

So in short, current difficulty is not THE factor for pricing, but it is A factor.

Let them sell. Right now we are rounding up all the sheep and sending them to slaughter.

Their loss is my gain.

Economics is a complex psychological matter.

Sunk costs slowly drives price, that's my belief. But the effect of difficulty on prices is overshadowed by the more rapid effect of price on difficulty. It's like how stars work, a contest between gravity and heat, gravity as the weaker force but still has its effect.

you're simply assuming your conclusion. the very proposition in dispute is that the step from 'higher difficulty' to 'value increases' reflects a causal process.

there is very little reason to think that a causal process exists for that particular step. of course, it is impossible to rule it out in practice, because it could reflect a complex psychological or economic phenomenon. that is why i say it requires empirical support. but it has no theoretical support.

without any empirical grounding, all people are doing is offering entirely unjustified conjecture for that step in your 'cycle'. by contrast, more than base conjecture is available for the other steps of the cycle, for it makes perfect sense that more resources will be devoted to mining if it is more profitable for people to do so.

this is, as asdf has said, extremely obvious. it is a trivial analysis. that the confusion persists is baffling.

hahaha, If Bitcoins dropped to zero, I would just buy them all up, and it would cost me ZERO!

Fixed it for you



This image represents why it's funny to see people arguing about it.

The evidence is to the contrary. For Bitcoin to have got thru the last 2 weeks and hold its value at 15 is ample proof of its resilience.

Regardless of the other arguments going on, I just have contention with you saying that bitcoins are a finite resource when you really mean that production is finite and predictable. Well, mostly so, at least, as rapid growth can make the 1 block/10 minutes target quite a bit shorter.

In other words, staying with the bounds of your argument, there would need to be an increase in miners equivalent to the creation of new bitcoins just to maintain the same level of demand.

Of course then we can argue that more miners means more network power, which means higher difficulty, which might or might not cause or be caused by increasing exchange value, which brings in new non-mining investors, which kills the duck that ate the bug that stung the man which built the home which houses the family that murdered each other in cold blood after one too many nursery rhymes.

Actually people laugh when they see a completely unbacked thing being called currency(plus talks of a BTC "economy" that exists only in forum threads) and expecting something to be worth 30$ (that's the number kicked around here, some have ofc already mentioned 100$ and whatnot) that cost between 0.5-2$ to "make"/hash.


To make dimensions clear: MtGox had 90+% of total trade volume. They had 60k users. That's about as much as 2-3 tribes on a small island that decide to use seashells as money.

That's your current "internet revolution".

Move miners from the supply side to the demand side to suit your hypothesis... brilliant!

This type of shit is the reason certain people laugh when you mention Bitcoins.