Topic: Out in the wild - people think Bitcoins will drop to 0 - page 2. (Read 7551 times)

Here me out I'm going to use your logic here.

If the same amount of bitcoins are made every week, but the number of miners increases then what happens? We form  DEMAND for a finite resource, thus making the coins even more valuable.  If people want it, it doesn't matter what me or anyone else says, the price is going up. Maybe the demand will very well be sparked by the miners themselves, but demand is demand nonetheless.

There are a lot of factors in play, yes, but we need to keep in mind that there's no direct pull on a BTC buyer to pay more because Joe Miner only makes 2 BTC/day today, whereas he made 4 BTC/day last week.

The SAME NUMBER OF BITCOINS are produced every week, regardless of how many miners participate in the bounty.

Print that out, put it on your wall. It cuts to the essence of this "difficulty" controversy.

Er... difficulty follows price, right? Isn't this obvious.

Value increase -> mining becomes more profitable -> more miners -> higher difficulty

This is so trivial, I can't believe there is so much debate about it. Miners may have some small influence on the market when they sell their bitcoins, but surely real demand + speculation is driving the price, which, in turn, drives difficulty by the mechanism I described.

Keep telling yourself that your simple supply/demand calculations are going to prove that price will follow difficulty, and that people who are newly investing in Bitcoin will pay whatever the miners demand.

You'd do well to note that the first price slump of the last month or so was simply caused by an early adopter cashing out (no hacking, no sudden media attention or scrutiny, and no misunderstandings of the tech) - again, someone will always mine cheaper than you or I.

Miners don't get to set the price - the price is what people are willing to buy them for.

The only reason the market is in the dumps is because of recent hackings, scrutiny by the media, and bitcoins sudden thrust into the main stream. In the future when more people sign on to bitcoin, and the technology is truly understood. People will only have a few things to go by when looking into bitcoins value.

Which are:
1. How many coins are currently in existence. (Supply)
2. How interchangeable is the currency itself. (Businesses and Exchanges, and overall DEMAND)
3. How hard is it to make new currency (MINING).

Other than that everything else is hog wash.

Correlation != causation. Difficulty jumped what, 60% last time, yet we're at lower prices than we were last period. Why aren't miners holding onto their coins until prices increase?

I'll answer you: because miners don't get to set the fuckin' price.


Relax. I'm not being elitist, I'm merely pointing out that most kids in dorm rooms don't typically pay directly for utility bills - in their mind the electricity is "free". If they already put together the box with part of their student loan money or grant money, then in their mind they have no "costs" involved and therefore they will always mine cheaper than you or I will.

So you aren't going to have any collusion between miners to not sell their BTC below a certain threshold, and even if you did - as I said, newly minted Bitcoins make up a tiny fraction of the BTC that change hands each day, so the effect on the market would be negligible.

You can point out the trend all you like, but betting the farm on the fact that the price is going to follow difficulty to the sky is a fool's bet.

When I predicted the price would go to 0, even making a whole thread about it, it actually did 2 days later. So you are completely wrong.

well, this has all already been debated ad nauseam, so let me try to make a somewhat different claim that might be novel:

there's little evidence that any advice to buy or sell ever posted in this forum has influenced the short-term price of bitcoins.

maybe that should suggest that people stop wasting their time trying ineffectively to manipulate the market - on both sides, of course!

Are we looking at the same chart sir? Have you not seen the trend? As the difficulty goes up SO HAS THE PRICE. Do I have to EXPLAIN the graph to you?

EDIT:Miners are only going to sell their coins for whatever THEY think they're worth.. If people don't like their prices, then they can't participate in the new bitcoin market, simple as that.. And whats wrong with college students running 5970's? Anyone should be able to mine, it shouldn't be restricted to the super nerdy, or the elite. Are you serious?

Your graph hasn't done anything to demonstrate that your assertion that price follows difficulty is correct.

Majority of buyers don't give a shit about mining difficulty/costs, and so it doesn't factor in to what they're willing to pay. Higher mining costs might cause more miners to hold on to what they mine, marginally affecting supply (the coins mined each day are a tiny fraction of the coins that change hands every day), but at the end of the day a Bitcoin is only worth whatever you can sell it to someone for.

And there's always gonna be some punk kid at college in a dorm with 3 5970s who doesn't care about his costs and just wants a dimebag. Unk, Angelus and others are therefore correct - the price doesn't follow difficulty.

It's hard to see anyone's true colors on this site. The guy who made this post did it to promote his crap forum, and here we are debating your motives. I never attacked you personally, but me and you both know that that's whats going on here. People are taking advantage of the open source nature of this community, to slant the odds to their favor through forceful methods. I was technically wrong about the difficulty level never going down, and I'm sorry if I misinformed anyone, but what I meant was that if the projects hold up, and everything keeps exploding the way it has, I don't see difficulty ever going down.. But that really isn't a bad thing for you, that harder it is to mine them, the more your currency is worth.

Here's the chart, while there have been a few downswings in difficulty, the line is predictable, and in steady upward motion.


But overall you were right, Bitcoin difficulty can drop, but it's highly unlikely to ever drop to the point it was even 2 months ago. There is simply to many people signing on to  the system now (myself included)

something only has value if someone is willing to pay for it.
.....and there does seem to be a market, although today BTC is trading below their creation costs.
Looks like a buy.

No, we don't "know it's not likely"... and that might be part of the reason people approach it with some skepticism. Their loss, if it turns out they're wrong, "fortune favors the bold".

Having said that, it's doing far better than I thought it would. We come out on the other side of Tradehill resuming trading with a crash barely down $5, and it's rebounded well and in my extremely uneducated opinion the market depth is looking quite healthy at the moment. We'll have to wait and see what happens when all the people burned by Mt Gox get access to their BTC - if a lot of them cut and run as fast as they can we're in for another wild ride... but if even those who do want to cash out do so in an unemotional, logical way I think the BTC can weather that storm too.

People have been saying "it's going to die any day now" for over a month now, and we're still back up above the long term weighted exponential averages. I'm not a Bitcoin investor (at the time of writing I have absolutely no holdings besides what's in my mining pool account), but I think it's looking pretty good right now.

The Bitcoin "economy" is looking pretty healthy right now for the rape it's just been through, probably due in large part to die hards who still believe. Hopefully it doesn't turn out they're all delusional, and we grow an actual economy.

"the better proof that the al coran is arab, is that not a single camel is mentioned inside it" Jorge Luis Borges

please don't impugn my motives. i've likely been with bitcoin longer than you have, and i have a very large collection of coins. i have no plans to buy (or sell) any anytime soon, and i don't have an account on any of the exchanges.

it's silly that i have to say that to make a factual point. i was not making a prediction about bitcoin prices or difficulty. i was simply correcting factual errors in your post, and i wouldn't have bothered except that you've been spreading misinformation in many discussions. i'm concerned that novices and potential bitcoin users might actually believe you.

bitcoin has many strengths (though i'm no particular fan of the presently prominent block chain, given its particular, path-dependent history, the economic context it occupies, and the false promotion it has received). let it succeed without vigorously promoting it with either errors or lies. otherwise, you come across fairly transparently as the kind of pump-and-dumper who spams yahoo finance about penny stocks.

Not Believing in something does not make it any less real, The Camels Nose is in the Tent, bitcoin is happening !

So basically every broke person that just found out about bitcoin on this forum is trying to make the coin crash, so the difficulty can drop, and so they can buy in at pennys? IT'S not dropping ANY TIME SOON.. Neither is the RATE.

They are trading at $25 a coin on ebay FFS

http://shop.ebay.com/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=m570.l1313&_nkw=bitcoin&_sacat=See-All-Categories

This is after the whole mtgox thing, they were almost at $40 before this whole bullshit apocalypto crash happened.

I want people to buy-in and participate, but the way that so many have gone about this has been so childish it's made me sick to my stomach.

i predict bitcoin values will drop below zero, and you will have to pay me to dispose your stinky coins for you. so hand over them coins now while i can still take them in for free. this is a limited offer.

you say this many times, but it's simply incorrect except as a complex psychological matter that, as applied to any specific context, requires empirical validation.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_costs

you've also claimed that difficulty cannot go down; this is incorrect too. it can and has.

Excellent idea -- if your employer will do it

Of course, you'd have to convince your electric company, grocery store, etc...