Bitcoin Forum

With almost 11 million coins in circulation, and the way the exchange market is currently laid out, I think we have a problem...

A market order to sell 311000 bitcoins right now would net 4278841.7722 USD and would take the last price down to 1.0000 USD, resulting in an average price of 13.7583 USD/BTC.

It takes someone selling 311k coins to crash the price to $1, which would/could completely kill Bitcoin off again. While 311k coins at current prices seem like something extraordinary, keep in mind that only a few years ago people were buying pizzas for 10k coins, so there could still be a few people holding hundreds of thousands of coins.

People like to think that the market cap is 500 million, but it isn't. Someone with just 311k+ coins could simply make the price go to 0.

I think the problem is in the design of the currency - and every other cryptocurrency modeled after Bitcoin. Early adopters are rewarded with a lot of coins, and once the currency gets mainstream, they have too much control.

While a sane individual wouldn't sell 311k all at once but rather spread them over a longer period of time and get more profit, a reckless or malevolent entity (government?) could simply kill any cryptocurrency in its medium/late stages simply by keeping a huge stack of coins from early on.

I'm not sure what the actual solution here could be, but I think it would've made more sense for the block generation reward to actually start low, and increase over time, than the other way around.

This would've hardly changed anything for early adopters because:
100 people competing over 720 coins per day is still better than a million people competing over 7200 coins per day.

True, they wouldn't have been rewarded so massively that it's potentially destabilizing, but they would've still been rich now.

Thoughts?


Edit: Since I'm sure I didn't discover hot water here and the ways of crashing the economy have been discussed before, I emphasized my main point above ^.

Learn to use the search bar.

Haahah... we really need better newbie filters. Like, really.

Sorry if this was discussed before, couldn't find a thread discussing the implications of having a small reward to start, that then increases over time.

Good point.  Let's go home everyone.  An orderbook-based trade execution system for exchanging commodities or securities is never going to work, because not everything is on the orderbook at once.  Interesting that no one spotted this before, but it's obvious now you look at it.

See you at $1.

Someone sell bitcoins for 1$?  :o

I'm not religious but I pray every day this happens.

I think I was misunderstood, I'm not interested in the specifics of what it would take to crash the price, it was mainly an intro for my question about the reward system being flawed/broken.

People like you who claim this flaw aren't thinking things over realistically, if someone buys up lots of Bitcoins or gains a lot of them the price will rise because of demand and the volume in circulation while the price in dollars will certainly crash Bitcoin itself will remain unaffected. People are still going to be able to trade with the small amount of coins left and of course as others have pointed out in threads I've seen without using search 1 Bitcoin alone can be divided up into millions of decimals.

In theory if the Bitcoin becomes that valuable then we will be dealing in 0.100000's of Bitcoins rather than in full Bitcoins because owning a whole Bitcoin will be like being a billionaire in conventional paper money, the difference between the paper money and Bitcoin of course is that the volume can't be increased. So to make a long and tiring argument short, yes, BTC/USD price can be crashed, but Bitcoin itself will be fine, it's a bit like when MTGOX was hacked, people panicked, but the reality is Bitcoin is still here and still being traded. We also had the GBLSE taken down recently and that hasn't drastically affected everything either and then there was that glitch with the MTGOX exchange too, while that crashed the price for USD, Bitcoin itself could still be openly traded without problems using the clients.

Because nobody would mine, since it is going to become easier with time anyway. And if nobody wants to start, you won't ever reach the later levels of the project. Early adopters _need_ to be rewarded, or there would be no early adopters at all, effectively killing Bitcoin before it even started. Remember, those coins were worthless when the project started. Yet people were spending electricity, buying hardware, buying coins with a _very_ uncertain future. Those who took those risks have to be rewarded.

Crashing the market price doesn't kill Bitcoin. In fact the dollar price did crash from all time highs of $30+ to around $2. Look at this chart:

http://money.cnn.com/2013/03/06/technology/innovation/bitcoin/

Bitcoin is still here and valued at new all time highs, in fact.

It would only take one person mining at the start though. People were already doing it even though they didn't know what to expect, and people compete with each other for "internet" points all the time... I don't think it would've made things any different mining wise.

It would've kept the price a lot more stable though, that's for sure. As more people got into it, more coins would be generated, so the price would stay lower for a longer time.

Maybe I went to a terrible University but my understanding is that 1 > 0. If, however, this is wrong, please let me know. No wonder I have bugs pop up in my code if this is incorrect.

Not to argue with the rest of the idiocracy, but just that specifically.

I am thinking realistically, please re-read my post. I didn't argue about someone buying coins now, but already having them from early rounds back when they didn't cost as much, or anything at all. This is a flaw in the reward system IMHO.

Notice the +... That means slightly over in most circles.

My logic applies either way, Bitcoin itself isn't as affected by peoples spending or saving habits as drastically as hysterical people here are claiming.

What is your margin for slightly over? If you double that number you won't be able to bring the price to 0. But maybe double does mean slightly. You'll have to confirm that as well.

There's a FAQ on this.

Google had the same problem early on. Its early adopters could have sold all of their shares at any point and dropped the price drastically.

That is public information though, and there are regulations. None of that data is available to us.

Look, I'm not saying that Bitcoin will fail because of this, but until all the wealth distributes more or less evenly with no single entity holding a large amount, this will be a problem for the foreseeable future. This problem could've been avoided with a reversed reward structure.

Like the dollar?

Ok, you're right. I originally meant to put 1 there, as in the previous sentence, I mistakenly rounded it off without digits to 0. My apologies. That is hardly the point I'm trying to make here so  stop trying to sound so superior over minor details.

If anyone has over 300k bitcoin, please sell em off and crash it to $1!!  I would eat em up.

No, not like the dollar because someone wouldn't have held a huge amount in the early days. They would've held a lot less. Because -> inflation.

Only 8 decimals man. Calm down please..... You meant millions of Satoshies.

yum yum. I'll outbid your dollar @1.1

Well, the Fed prints out billions of dollars and gives it to their banker buddies before inflation hits. Then those buddies use that money for investments before inflation hits. Then as it trickles down to you and me the money is inflated.

As for the way Bitcoin was created in order to award early adopters, it allowed people who may have otherwise just tried it out to have a large stake and incentive to make Bitcoin succeed. The risk was also higher early on to put in any time or money because it was an unproven technology.

To go the opposite way of awarding latecomers and not awarding early adopters would have had people waiting to adopt Bitcoin until the incentive was there, which would have led to Bitcoins early demise.

The early comers would've still been awarded more, because they'd have been fewer.

100 people competing over 500 coins per day is still better than a million people competing over 50000 coins per day.

It would've kept mining feasible for a longer time for the average Joe, possibly helping boost interest.

Exactly. If someone successfully crashed the market by dumping their many thousands of bitcoins it would mean a buying opportunity for many, while the market recovered resulting in a wider distribution of those coins which is what the OP wants in the first place. Next question.

But bitcoin is not about mining.  People today should find a different way to earn their bitcoin income.

Bitcoin today is not about mining, but if the reward structure was reversed it could've been. Perhaps the official client would've mined for you by default, strengthening the network at the same time to survive 51% attacks (opt-in of course).

Think about it, we've had an exponential increase in number of people getting into bitcoin, but the biggest chunk has already been generated. We're probably at 0.1% of total global potential as far as bitcoin is concerned, but more than 50% of the coin is already out there.

While the number of adopters is exponentially increasing, the supply is potentially exponentially decreasing. While this is a good thing for hoarders, I don't consider it healthy. Would've been a lot healthier if the two curves were heading the same direction rather than battling head to head.

Yet, you're wrong. The distribution curve didn't need to look that way, people got into it anyway because of the same reason they compete for high scores in Facebook games. It was play money as far as they were concerned, otherwise they wouldn't have bought pizzas for 10 000 BTC. Note that WoW gold cost more than BTC for a long time.

However, even though things panned out this way they would've still been rich now, simply because there would've been more BTC/person mined in the early days than there are now. See my earlier post:


 It's simple math.

Edit: I should've said 7200 coins per day for greater impact (at max 50 BTC per block reward), not 50000. So yeah, think 7200.

I can fully understand the concerns of the OP. Its just a shame its becoming taboo to suggest that Crypto coins are in some way flawed!

However, People will sell out as they reach their personal version of super rich.  Eventually, the owners of the majority of bitcoins will be those same rich people who are currently on top of the hill!

There is an old saying that if all the money in the world was equally divided, it would only take a week before we would be back to where we are today! ;)

nwbitcoin: Have a tip, because Kurt Cobain and because you're probably the only one with an open mind around here. :)

Note to everyone: I'm very much into Bitcoin myself, and would love to see it succeed, but everyone should be at least a little worried that if an evil entity (government?) had millions of coins from the early days they could easily send the price back to $1 again, with a lot of people losing a lot of money.

However, I don't want to go into this debate again, we're strictly talking about the reward structure here.

It is like 2011 all over again with everybody thinking they found the "critical deathblow" to Bitcoin.  Why is it rational discussion and USD price are inversely correlated?

To OP simple version is:
There aren't more than a handful of people with hundreds of thousands of BTC, and they have a vested interest in not destroying their own wealth.  Even if they act irrationally they can only do so once.

Personally I think the number of imaginary multi hundred thousands BTC early adopters is probably close to zero but let say he/she exists and for some asinine reason decides to tank the market.  Ok.  A drop from $32 to $2 didn't kill Bitcoin.  A drop from $50 to $1 won't either. The value is in what Bitcoin can DO not it's current price.

Still even if such adopter exists one would have to suspend disbelief that he/she would act so irrationally.  He mined them over the course of a year for fun.  Then suddenly they were worth a $1.  $311K for something fun.  Yet Joe Early doesn't sell.  He watches the price climb to $32 making him a millionaire ten times over but doesn't sell.  Why?  Maybe he believe BTC is worth a lot more.  The price crashes and he doesn't sell on the way down.   He doesn't sell at the bottom despite seeing the paper value evaporate.   Over the next two years the price slowly rises and he COULD have sold a thousand or so coins a week without affecting the price and pocketed millions of dollars if that was his goal.  However 4 years later he hasn't done any of that.  Why?  Really the only plausible scenario is that he is a diehard true believer, "A bitcoin will change the world as we know it" type.

So Joe Early is now Joe the Apostle.  Yet for some reason he decides to cripple adoption (at least in the short term) by crashing the market.  Hurting his own net worth, hurting his credibility, and hurting the thing he is a diehard believer in.   Does that even sound close to plausible?

Still time will solve even this non-problem.  I remember the same "doomsday scenarios" except at one time it was tens of thousands of BTC, then a hundred thousand BTC.  Now it is a beyond silly hundreds of thousands of BTC, someday it will be "well if someone accumulated over a million BTC they could crash the market below $100". :)

Don't let reason interfere with a good story DeathandTaxes... cordo knows, and Kurt Cobain is really cool  ;D

Well, it should be possible to write a script that checks the blockchain for bitcoins that were not touched at all in the past 2 years (atomically). Since they're traceable to their genesis, we should be able to find out exactly how many are in circulation and how many are being hoarded.

This is just a major flaw, I didn't say it's a critical deathblow.

If however Bitcoin2 was made today from stuff we learned from Bitcoin, I think it makes a lot more sense to have a reversed reward structure - please try to debate on that.

To everyone else being offtopic here, your air of superiority just makes you look dumb.

Oh, gosh, what an astonishing idea! If only someone had come up with it before...  ;D

At least two chains already made a compromise, they put out the same number of coins per block forever.

That is a step in the direction the OP wants, yet it does not seem to have caused those chains to be widely adopted instead of the "flawed" chains that produce less coins over time.

-MarkM-

There are various things at play in making something truly successful. Associating with the right people, bringing awareness and sometimes novelty factor is the most important, execution barely matters most of the time. (Not saying Bitcoin is badly executed.)

Regarding what is going to happen in the long term, we'll have to wait and see, in a decreasing reward system the market is easily manipulated, in an increasing reward system, the market is much more stable. That's all I'm saying. Conceptually, it's the right thing to do, and I'm waiting for someone to prove this wrong.

The burden of proof is on you, surely?

-MarkM-

The network is secure enough, and having a few hundred CPU's mining as well would not help on bit.  The mining structure is working very well.  I was worried that the hashrate would half when the reward halved.  That did not happen in fact, the network much more secure today then it has ever been.  The reward structure was genius the way it was set up.  It's a shame that you don't see that beautiful fact. 

That's entirely false, there are a few mining pools which have the majority of the power right now. They decide exclusively what protocol changes are adopted, not the actual end-users.

That's not working as intended, Satoshi intended for everyone to have equal voting rights, instead of delegating them to a few super powers (the pools).

I don't think you quite understand how mining works.  Go ahead and start your own block chain and show us how well it will work.  I'll be surprised if the price doesn't take a dive before your reward doubling event. 

I don't think you understand how mining and feature adoption works. You might want to look at things like P2SH and its voting process before you post. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=60829.0

The mining nodes can decide whatever they want but they still rely on the rest of the network to propagate the blocks they create.

I think D&T has it sewn up as usual, and since it pretty much mirrors my own feelings on the subject, I'm reposting it here because I think codro has cateracts or something. And codro, I've enjoyed your trolling, now please go back to the beginning of your own thread and reread all the explanations for why you are wrong. I have, and your asinine (thanks for the choice of words D&T) reasoning is going to give you a stroke if you continue to claim you can walk through walls with your own personalised form of logic.

The way I see it is if the inverse had occurred. With tiny amounts first, then ever greater amounts, this can easily be construed as a classic example of the already existing inflationary cycle in existing finance. It disincentivises adoption. Ask yourself this, why acquire and use a currency that will be at least guaranteed to be worth half it's value in 4 years as the subsidy doubling kicks in. And imagine the havoc 100+ years down the track when the doubling hit the 21mil limit. What then?

A doubling system of this nature, at every step, disincentivises risk taking, early adoption, and use in general. Bitcoin is already pushing against several hundred years of financial tradition, suspicion, and entrenched reasoning, when it attempted to create a completely new system of value exchange. It needed some huge carrots to get it going. Yes, I guess you could say some early adopters were "lucky", but they are also the evangelists that had a vested incentive because they wanted to not just spread their discovery, they were financially inclined to work for Bitcoin, so Bitcoin could work for them.

Selfish and selfserving? Absolutely.

A brilliant way to bootstrap a totally untested, brand new disruptive currency from nothing for the good of all that adopted it? Absolutely.

Punishing early adopters with this halfbaked, communist-like asshattery makes me feel like you guys are taking crazy pills.

You truly are clueless about what drives value. Please stay away from replying to things you don't have the mental capacity to understand.

In a real economy the population and adoption doesn't increase at the rate it does in a new economy/currency that becomes successful. Inflation in Bitcoin, for the short to medium term actually makes sense and is desirable. 100 people with 100 coins is the same as 1 million people with 1 million coins - it is not inflation. In a fiat inflationary economy, the number of coins arbitrarily increases without major population changes, the billion people with a gajillion dollars today are the billion people with two gajillion dollars tomorrow..

The way the wealth was distributed is plain wrong and leads to people controlling the market extremely easily. It could be argued that it's just an honest mistake however, Satoshi only had one shot at getting this right.

The flaw is that: You only need a few thousand coins to initiate a crash, have everyone else panic sell then buy back in at lower prices, essentially growing your portfolio every time and gaining more and more control. Basic economics and this is exactly what happened last night. A steady supply of new coins as adoption increases would have prevented that.

Regarding havoc in 21 years when the limit hit, there wouldn't be any - you fail at doing the math again. Assuming a generous 7200 coins generated per day and hundred of millions of users (at the very least), that's less than 0.000072 new coins per person per day being generated at that time.

You have to be extremely closed minded to not see the wealth distribution as a big problem for the foreseeable future, in regards to trading and market stability. I ensure you that I'm not crying here that I didn't buy in early, perhaps I did and am holding a sizable amount of coins - perhaps I didn't, that's not the point.

If there's one big flaw that has the potential of destroying Bitcoin's credibility and hinder its long term success, it's this. People control the market way too easily. Is there anything that can be done now about it? Probably not, which is the scary part.

There is something that can be done, play the system and see what happens.

Bitcoin isn't a one shot deal.  It can easily fail, and a new phoenix grow out of the ashes. Let's see what breaks as things start to scale and remember where it all goes wrong! Eventually, it might get so broken that it can't continue.  At that point, we start again with something like Litecoin - safe in the knowledge that we won't make the same mistakes again.

Eventually, the problems will no longer be technical and the role of the geek in the bitcoin project will dwindle to very little.  That will upset a few people too!

The question is, if this is a real problem or not, and if it is it a technical one or a business one?

Actually if Bitcoin were to fail because of this, Litecoin would fail as well because its generation curve is the same. It's a business problem, not a technical one.

You didn't factor in the equation the fact that Joe Early could actually be Joe Banker or Joe Government who has a vested interest in seeing Bitcoin fail. They can crash the price to nearly nothing, then buy even more cheap coins in the aftermath. And if the coin still refuses to die, do it all over again a couple of years later. It's not rocket science, and people do it all the time for personal gain with smaller amounts (which is what causes the mini crashes).

hahahaha  :D

thats what everyone wants atm  



 

Your appeal to authority is amusing. This carefully crafted scenario you've made up is completely and utterly baseless. It's also rather bemusing that you think the Bitcoin would've stood a chance without providing large incentives for early users. Additionally, do you honestly think people scatter like mice when trouble brews? In a free market there are those that take risks for gain, and there are those that are ready to maximise on others' losses. This in itself cushions against volatility if the market isn't tampered with. Messing with distribution of coins would just makes the effects worse. All you want to do is secure people's wealth (people already holding Bitcoins), you want to minimise risk by protecting the risk averse that step into the ring early and consolidate value first. You want a system that cushions those that are already using the system against any volatility. Funnily there is already a system that does this exactly, it's called the federal reserve, and it's "cushioning" (also called bailing out of wall-street, governments et al.) is about to launch itself over a cliff. Look up the 1907 crash, and what happened post-crash. Do some historical reading.

For all your bluster, hand-waving, patronising attitude, and doomsday scenarios, your depth of reasoning is rather shallow.


I shouldn't be too harsh though. I have a proposition for you, just like every other competing chain that has absolutely failed on it's own "merits", I would love to see you start an alt-chain with the properties you mention just so you can prove us all wrong here. You don't have any excuse, lots of people have launched their own. Litecoin did a bang up job pandering to everyone's doubts about Bitcoin's original parameters, they even pandered to your fears that the wealth was unevenly distributed and released the client to all at a specified time so as many miners as possible got on board at the same time. If you truly think your argument bears out, then I reckon your chain will be welcomed and adopted by the rest of the community. Healthy competition is good for everyone. Or if you are all just talk, move to Litecoin, I'm sure they'll be glad to have you.

Y'know, cos you're right and all... don't disappoint us now.

Your early incentives point makes no sense. What you fail at understanding in your reasoning is that the so called early incentives were not as big of a deal as you make them out to be. Bitcoin would've survived and slowly grown regardless - for the same reason people compete in Angry Birds and its market cap is as big as bitcoin's, or the reason they spend money on powerups in various pointless games - mining was fun.

A huge majority couldn't have known that they would eventually trade for actual dollars - proof stands in all the coins lost in the early days. And if they did, as early adopters they would've still had amassed a lot more coins than the late adopters. Logic.

A more gradual build up of wealth, rather than majority controlling stakes from the get-go would've helped tremendously in stabilizing the market.

In "Satoshi's Grand Design" the transaction fees were supposed to be 0.01 not 0.0005.

This would've made each block generate an additional ~12BTC in fees at current volume and probably more going forward, which would've offset some of the problems of the curve. Sure, 0.01 would've been noncompetitive for transactions lower than say 1 coin - so perhaps we're not using the coin as originally intended, and it was never meant to be used for micropayments in its current design. The official website even states: "Bitcoin is an experimental new digital currency that enables instant payments to anyone, anywhere in the world."

What I'm trying to promote here is putting some thought into all this, think about what we can learn from it. Try coming up with valid points so we can have a meaningful debate rather than defending early miners' ridiculous rewards - which make no economic sense.

Not trying to diss Bitcoin in any way, I'd really love to see it succeed and I have significant stakes in it - but the fact that people with as few as 10000 coins (0.9% of total coins) can swing the BTCUSD price up and down by more than 10% could scare away the companies getting into it. 10000 is not that much, SatoshiDice makes more than that in profit each month, and someone holding that amount and selling easily triggers a crash and can then buy more than 10000 in the aftermath before it recovers.

This rollercoaster isn't good for credibility. How can we prevent it?

I thought the making a profit by deliberate crashes myth was a myth?

Wasn't it argued that they would actually lose by attempting that since all they really do is give away their coins cheap?

On the other hand I have wondered since the $32 days of 2011 how the heck the price was being kept so low so long.

-MarkM-

It's not a myth. I know someone that sold during the mini crash a few nights ago at $42 and bought back at $35 and made 500 coins profit. This person was probably one of the main reasons for the crash as well, because he sold a sizable amount of coins (several thousands).

I personally sold at $42 and bought at $40 (gox lag...) and made several coins profit as well.

http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/vcxUSD_depth.html

Here it only takes you 39BTC to crash the exchange rate to $1. Go ahead

Just so your comment doesn't look completely asinine (new favorite word in this thread) by itself, I'm going to help you out by saying that yeah, the fact MtGox is practically a monopoly is also somewhat detrimental. The rest of the exchanges are mainly only good for arbitrages as far as the actual big fish are concerned (if that).

I feel like I'm wasting my time explaining, but it might be useful to others reading so here goes.


Bitcoin was never pegged at a price, this is precisely what price discovery does, on top of this only miners were rewarded with coins and it was ALWAYS proportional to their contribution to the security of the network. Do you get it yet? these guys were PAID to run the Bitcoin network. There was never a free lunch and never a monopolistic clique that planned it. Nor was if for "fun", it was a job, and these guys got compensated for their hard work, hardware, and electricity. The software was released January 2009, free, available to all. If they got paid more than the latecomers, it's because they propped it up long enough and well enough so that others could get on board and help bear the weight, we should be worshipping these people, KnightMB is a hero in my books, he accrued over 300k in Bitcoins, because he used a cluster of CPUs he borrowed from Amazon (a guy you'd probably deride as an opportunist etc. etc.) and he also was instrumental in helping fix early problems that Bitcoin had https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9524#msg9524 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.msg9524#msg9524), he claims he already spent much of it but I sincerely hope he has a spare 50k lying around because he fucking deserves it.


Actually we did know, and most of us are still here. The "proof" is because you're pissy that a vast number of early adopters are "endangering" the value of the coins you own because they hold too many. Logic. Funny, it was never marketed as anything less than a digital cash payment system, they weren't marketed as "internet points", and the second I discovered Bitcoin I was treating it like a cash system too, because like everyone else I had to mine to get them and that meant work, when CPUs were only just still fashionable I actually went and BOUGHT a computer just for mining because I wanted Bitcoins, they certainly weren't passing them out like flyers at a store, I knew I was getting something of value that was difficult to get. So did a lot of other people like Hal Finney, http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09975.html (http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09975.html).


You want gradual buildup, go to litecoin, theres your out, use it. Liquidate your BTC into LTC and bask in the market stability such a system bestows upon it's users.

Price discovery and adoption will stabilise the market, not manipulation of the supply. How would that work exactly? Does the system know when the market is stable and when it is volatile so it can spit out the "right" amount of coins. Which markets? which currencies are more influential than others? Should we prioritise currencies based on their political stability?  Adoption follows sentiment, and sentiment can only be gauged by price discovery, not some trickle that will slowly turn into a damn flood. Even Satoshi saw that distributing most of the coins quickly was better than any other option  , and 4 years is hardly a short amount of time I might add.

 (http://www.mail-archive.com/cryptography@metzdowd.com/msg09979.html)
"[Bitcoins will] be distributed to network nodes when they make blocks, with the amount cut in half every 4 years. [...] When that runs out, the system can support transaction fees if
needed. It's based on open market competition, and there will probably always be nodes willing to process transactions for free." http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=21312004 (http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=21312004)

When you speak of "Satoshi's Grand Design" you quote the source, otherwise you look like a fool.


"Meaningful" hu? All I've heard from you is the sound of a baby having a fit. Miners from two years ago ARE your betters that ensured Bitcoin survived long enough so you could enjoy it. I'm incredibly grateful, and I also hope Satoshi has a sizable portion of Bitcoins because he damned well deserved every one of them. So did the early developers that got on board, and the early testers, and the ones that helped stimulate the economy by beginning the first exchanges, and the ones that jumped in on mining with their CPUs, GPUs, etc. so that the network remained secure. They ALL deserved every skerrick of value that their Bitcoins now derive.


Price discovery and greater adoption will spread more coins into more hands. Stop having kittens over the price, sounds to me you've overreached in your investment in Bitcoin so cash out to something that will allow you to sleep at night.


See above. We are embarking on a huge experiment full of pitfalls, immense possibilities and unexpected side-roads. Expect volatility or get out while you can.

Umm, that reward system where they could dribble them out gradually at $40 and get $40 * n_coins, rather than crash it to $1 and get perhaps $20 * n_coins assuming an average fill at half the price?

Can you explain the flaw here again?  I missed it.

So a bunch of idiots threw away their coins cheap.

Changing the reward structure won't stop idiots from being idiots.

-MarkM-

A year from now, $50 coins will seem cheap.

You do realize that only one person mining could've kept the network running, right? Try understanding the protocol first. And before you cry 51% attack, get real - securing the network was not the primary reason people mined, you're delusional - and any sort of attack would've been circumvented easily. http://gavintech.blogspot.com/2012/05/neutralizing-51-attack.html

And lol @ that guy blowing 300k worth of coins, some "apostle" he was if he spent that much that early. We're in the what? 4th year of bitcoin? You have your values seriously screwed up if that's the kind of guy you're worshiping, considering everything.


You're completely unfamiliar with how this started and what it was at first. You got here after it was already pegged to the USD.


Litecoin has the same curve as Bitcoin, it has the same problem.


Notice that Satoshi said "seems like the best formula". Doesn't sound like he was as convinced as you are, of course, in your own little world you must think you're smarter.


Lol, some source you quoted. That has no relevance to the fact that transaction fees were designed to be 0.01 and not 0.0005 as they are now. Blocks are already getting full as per the original design, so even 30 years from now, if the same limits were kept as now, miners would still only make 0.6 BTC from fees for every block they mine. They would've made 12 BTC otherwise, which would've been more than the subsidy a lot earlier than at the cutoff.


Here you go again with the miner point, see #1. You're making miners look bad by defending them so much - seriously. I never accused miners of anything, I just pointed out how the system could've been designed to make more economic sense.


Go re-read all of your replies and see how you're attacking me while I'm simply pointing something out without attacking anyone (unless provoked). I haven't overreached my investment and I don't have problems sleeping at night. Calm down.

I'd buy them! It's a hole in the market to sell BTC at $1 ;D

Actually no, it takes two nodes to run a Bitcoin network. Bro, do you even lift?


Wow, it's like you are doing the heavy lifting lifting for me. I appreciate your dumbassery in print, but you're really not making this a challenge at all.


This isn't even a challenge.


Uhuh... so That would explain why it's falling like a stone then... http://www.ltc-charts.com/period-charts.php?period=6-months&resolution=day&pair=ltc-btc&market=btc-e (http://www.ltc-charts.com/period-charts.php?period=6-months&resolution=day&pair=ltc-btc&market=btc-e)


Moving the goalposts are we?


Yeah... you do realise you're full of it right? Remember those goalposts I mentioned? Funny how you make an absolute claim and then as soon as they look wobbly they become.... soluble.


Backtracking, defending, justifying. You should do yourself a favour and just stop responding.


I'll let the post history speak for itself.

One person, two nodes, right. Because one computer should be enough for everybody, I'm sure every serious miner only has one. Sounds legit.


Short term gain != long term success.

As for your other arguments:
In Internet slang, a troll (pron.: /ˈtroʊl/, /ˈtrɒl/) is someone who posts inflammatory,[1] extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community.

You trolled this topic long enough. Goodbye.

+1

if I had 300k btc this is exactly what I would do. Sell it all , make 4.2 mil, buy 300k btc back at $1, wait 2-3 years , do it again.

Codro: In your scenario is possible to BTC to touch $1, but just because an idiot sells all his btc to $1 does not means the rest are going to do the same, in fact, there will be a lot of people buying. If the price go down but there are no bad news any person with brain will buy more, not sell.So the price will recover very very fast. You can see in the prevous days what happend when someone dump a ton of coin. The price go down but recover very fast.

This is thread is all about BTC vs. USD. We're early adopters ONLY motivated to mine, buy, and develop in bitcoin so they can profit relative to the USD? I thought the motivation was to change the global monetary system by inserting a disruptive technology? What do I know, I'm a bit of a newb.

Any 100k+ coin holders earned their coins building something, and I do not believe they will be easily motivated to decimate the price of btc just to gain a few million in fiat. Your hypothetical selloff scenario is wildly improbable.

The fact that an instant selloff of 300k would only tank the price to $1 is a great sign! Thousands of bitcoiners would grab all those coins back for $5, $10, $15, $20... within ONE DAY bitcoin would be at $25 again, and the 300k seller would've effectively screwed themselves out of a ton of value by selling into all of those stale buy orders at $10 or $20.

To think that bitcoin has become this widespread this fast, with as much media exposure, development, and growth as we're seeing, and an early adopter with 300k coins can only get a few million by dumping ALL of their coins! For me, this shows that the playing field is fair, that we're still early adopters, and that the balance of the reward structure must be working EXTREMELY WELL.

Nah. I dont see value of bitcoin in keeping it. I only make money when it sold. Why keep?

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=46622.msg554717#msg554717

Basically, an Ease in Ease Out curve would led us to poor adoption and network fragility, people are welcome to test this generation curve with any AltCoins out there (I suppose no one tried yet):

http://disanji.net/iOS_Doc/documentation/Cocoa/Conceptual/Animation_Types_Timing/Art/standardtiming.jpg



This.