gpu mining destroyed the coin value
everyday its lower and lower
Just look at the net hash and difficulty, both are still climbing, this is like the coiled spring you see after any crypto has a big run up. Wont take much for the price to rocket and sellers at this price to be caught with their pants down.
Not really.
(a) If you believe the IRC chatter, the botnets are catching on.
(b) The cryptonotes in general, and XMR/BBR in particular, have been unreasonably profitable to mine, and this can't last.
"Unreasonably" meaning that they've been more than a factor of two or three more profitable than other coins, while having a smaller marketshare than other GPU-based coins. This means it's simply a matter of time before more miners re-point their rigs to XMR/BBR, and the diff will go up. What's been preventing them has been the technical difficulties of running CryptoNote for people used to bitcoin-clones, and the "first mover" advantage of people hopping on to these coins at the beginning.
The price is not a function of the diff. The diff is a function of the price.
Point b simply isn't true refer to the production cost discussed earlier in this or Ristos thread, in fact you were involved with the conversation at the time. For the vast majority of the last say two months XMR has been -ev to mine regarding production costs. I also explained how I know the majority of the network and its not botnets...
Furthermore if more people start pointing their GPU's (again GPU's are v close to cost of running CPU's) at XMR then that again negates the botnet aspect you speak of.
"The price is not a function of the diff. The diff is a function of the price."
That depends really. If a coin has a higher diff you get less per $ when mining thus you have to get more $ per coin to cover your costs.
Yes, I was involved in that discussion. It's unreasonable for EC2 to be profitable for any coin in the long run - its infrastructure is terribly mismatched to an optimal hardware configuration for mining. Ergo, over time, any coin should move to below-EC2-profitability as people move onto more optimal hardware.
EC2 can be profitable in the short term because of increasing prices, swinging difficulty levels, or lack of mining competition due to factors that prevent other miners from jumping on with more-optimized hardware (such as the difficulty in compiling or using the software, the flakiness of the pools, etc.).
Re botnets: The key phrase in my post is "are catching on".
One bot-herder claims about 500kh/s. That's about 3.5% of the net hash. I very carefully did not say that bots are a major factor yet. But they're getting ramped up. A coin with the near-parity of CPUs and GPUs that XMR has will remain very, very attractive for botnets for a long time. The herder could, of course, be lying, but I suspect not:
4:22 < dfsdfg> Pending Balance: 17.574765835491 XMR
14:22 < dfsdfg> Total Paid: 26998.685819999999 XMR
14:22 < dfsdfg> Last Share Submitted: just now
14:22 < dfsdfg> Hash Rate: 573.16 KH/sec
14:22 < dfsdfg> Total Hashes Submitted: 651433558000
To avoid creating more posts: Aminorex, I know quite well what the word function means, and I used it deliberately and carefully. I concur with Anon136's point that there is nuance there because of the possibility of a 51% attack for unpopular coins, but to a first approxmation, I stand by my statement. People who believe the difficulty affects the price (on more than a very short-term basis with poorly designed difficulty adaptation algorithms) do not understand the adaptive feedback loop that varies difficulty to keep the rate of coin production constant.
