Topic: Price seems stable now... (Read 7679 times)

OK that makes sense. that previous statement was misleading because he said they are "mined at the same rate". That poster should have said "the hashing rate stays the same".

You can pump out more than the entire hashing power of bitcoin in your flat without any ventilation or power supply?

Ok.

Yay, cheap coins again!

Seriously, just think about where it has been a while ago.

I think one of the reasons for this "correction" (a correction for now, I don't think it will be that low in a few days/weeks/months) is that it became important to people using it as a currency (or commodity or whatever you call it) to have a stable value. No offense, but I guess it's harder to grasp for some Americans because the USD still is some kind of reference currency (currently! even though it MIGHT be just a matter of time until this changes), but there are markets for currencies. No, I don't mean places to trade them, but reasons for trading them (foreign currency loans to name an example). On a market new goods (currencies/commodities in this case) have be valued. That's why some people call it a crash or a price explosion, while other call it a correction.

All markets are a lot about fear, but we have seen that. When someone talks about a crash or a crisis in real life it's exactly the same. It might be reasonable to sell shares of a small company, which maybe won't survive as long as the share still have some value, but it's completely stupid for people to sell for example Google shares when the price is lower then it should be given the fact that they will survive and start growing again. It actually is the best time to buy. Hmm, but you just have to look at some kind of stock market chart and scale it to something like five years.

It affects how long it will take given a certain hashpower (of -say- a single miner). It keeps how long it will take for the combined hashpower of all miners at a constant level (50 BTC in 10 minutes)

I think the important thing is that the individual difficulty will increase as long as the number of new coins is a constant. The more people who mine, the more people the coins will have to be divided between. It's like winning the lottery, except more and more people will pick the winning numbers. In the end, no one is going to bother entering since the ticket price will be that much higher compared to the prize you get *if* you happen to win that day.

exactly, but to keep the rate constant with increasing hashing power.

This seems wrong. If that were true then what would be the point of having "difficulty" at all? I thought difficulty affected how long it took to solve a block?

Bitcoins are mined at the same rate regardless of difficulty.

That's self correcting.  If a lot of miners get out difficulty drops, which makes mining more profitable.

The reason why it will cause loss of interest is that mining is not profitable anymore. I think this is a big part of the whole bitcoin craze. It will still have some interest, but it will lose alot.

It ran up from $1 to $30 really quickly.  a price drop back down to $15 or even $8 is not going to cause a loss of interest.

Yes It is very interesting times, I can't help  but keep checking the price of the bitcoin. I must admit, part of me wants it to go lower because I missed the boat on this one.

With the current drop into the $15 range, and nobody seems to want to pick it back up to $20. I think most people will not even take the risk at buying it at these lower prices with the hope it will bounce back up to its $20 dollar support.

Someone must have kept it inflated at the $20 dollar level. I have no idea why someone has done that and spent all the money keeping it at that level. I knew that would not hold as nobody has that deep pockets.

A fair and stable price level would be around $8.00.

I am surprised the forum is pretty silent about this latest price drop. This signals many things coming to and end especially the mining. This whole thing may lose much interest soon.

Like any economy, it will have its ups and downs; we seem to be experiencing a nice little downtrend. I wouldn't worry too much about it.

$16 and falling on MtGox as I write this.  The 'island of stability' around $19 to $20 didn't last too long.  Those 25k stolen BTCs being unloaded today after being laundered over the last couple of days?  Dead Cat Bounce has had its run? ($30 -> $10 -> $20 -> sub $10 if that's the case).  Interesting times.

Impossible to say at this point were it will go. Long-term depends on its real value as currency, that is, what you can actually buy with it. And that value is probably a lot lower than the current market value at the moment. If it ever gets anything close to mainstream, most guys on this forum would probably get rich. If it continues as a "geek-currency" you can use to pay for web-hosting and mining-rigs and such, the market-price will probably go down quite a bit. Only thing I feel pretty sure about is that it will never die completely.

Silk Road gives it value.

I'd say I'm more of this type, although I'm an engineer. I don't think it's necessarily a bad thing for the Feds, and governments of most countries, to regulate money. However, I do see the explosive growth potential for Bitcoins.

As I discussed in another post there are four potential groups of bitcoin users.  The geometric growth that we saw was the result of adoption by the second demographic: libertarian engineers.  We have achieved significant penetration in that market.  Next we have to get young hip people with fancy smart phones who eat at ethnic restaurants and buy things online.  Once we breach the demographic we'll see geometric growth again, and the price will soar into the hundreds, maybe thousands.  After that market is penetrated we'll see linear growth, as old people (who don't use bitcoin) die and are replaced by children who do.

However until we can hook that demographic we are going to see the price drop gradually.  People who need their money now will sell to people already in the market.  We aren't getting any new bitcoin users until bitcoin is a lot more polished and user friendly.  This requires new clients, smart phone support, and a decimal point shift.  This might take a long, long time.  However I believe that it will be done.  Right now many people are significantly invested in bitcoin.  There are people who stand to be millionaires if bitcoin succeeds.  I can see these people putting time and money towards making bitcoin succeed.  Those of us who are smaller players can play smaller parts.  We just need to penetrate into the next market and we'll all have money, until then we have a bunch of poker chips.

I agree with you, but I made a rough calculation that with 1 BN dollars coming to Bitcoin (this is really nothing in a global scale) we could very well see $500 price. Be cautious not to confuse market capitalization with total amount of money put into Bitcoins, as not all bitcoins are sold into the market at any given market price, but only a small fraction. Many bitcoins remain out of the market so far, or have been out of the market for weeks, stored in miners and early adopters saving wallets.

Just to give you an example, I am not going to sell my bitcoins before $1000-1500 unless I discover some fatal flaw in Bitcoin. I am here for the lon run, partly to support Bitcoin, and partly beacuse I believe we are at the very start of a big growth ahead. If it goes down I will accept that, even if I loose all my money.

Firstly, you're crazy, secondly, it's hopped back up to 17.36. I made a nice buy at the low point and sold just now, nice instant cash.