Bitcoin Forum

There has been a lot of talk on the forums lately about how the currency is slowly spiraling down. This is true, and there's a good reason for it. At this point, Bitcoin is little more then a stock. It is diving because it is primarily being used as an investment vehicle, similar to a junk bond or a penny stock, and people have hyped it up and now are dumping it off. It is a classic pump and dump. If you want to see examples in the market, go look at LEXG, CCME, SPNG. It was tragically foreseeable that bitcoin would be pumped and dumped the same way -- so now what. The miners making more bitcoin every day is called dilution. It happens with penny stocks too.

The biggest difference between Bitcoin and a penny stock is that bitcoin can easily be transferred from one person to another, directly, without having to deal with any kind of broker or third party. This means that as long as people are willing to accept BTC for goods and services, BTC will always have SOME kind of value. What people need to realize is that the run up to 30$/BTC was caused by an infusion of cash from daytraders who were using bitcoin as a cheap version or forex, or playing arbitrage games. These do NOT stimulate the value of bitcoin in any way, and these people can continue to use Bitcoin regardless of the price, because there money is in and out quickly enough to not suffer from downward price swings.

So Let's talk about how we can get together and make some good publicity for bitcoin.
I'm sure we've all got skillsets we could be putting to use to help generate interest in bitcoin - it's a pretty straightforward process.

Find something you're good at, preferrably something that can be transferred over the internet - web design, graphic design, coding, database work, writing copy, doing research, anything really - and set up a website where you offer your services. Offer the standard industry rate, accept paypal and bitcoin, and do it 20-25% cheaper for bitcoin. Yes it sucks doing things on the cheap, but you're not planning on selling your BTC right away anyways, you're planning on waiting until the price stablizes and goes up. The only thing that will make it go up is people having a reason to use bitcoin, and that's will be a steep discount at first. If you think that doing something for 20-25% cheaper is insane, consider this -- your BTC is worth 50% what was less a month ago, where do you think it's going to go if the world economy continues to contract and people are no longer looking at fringe investments?

There's a meet up in Seattle tomorrow that some of us in the area will be attending, I'll be bringing these points up. I think a lot of miners will be at this meeting, probably scared to death.

Currently doing some Python hacking for BTC, and since the price drop I'm probably working for 10% of my usual rate. However, I'm having fun doing it; it's the kind of thing I'd usually do in my spare time for free, so I'm not losing out.

I encourage other developers to do the same with small projects, I'm certainly enjoying it :)

Some of my fellow cohorts and I were kicking around the possibility of opening a poker room in Seattle that would offer to payout in Bitcoins.

Interesting...I guess you'd be taking the angle that you are not betting "money" or whatever it is that is prohibited by the central planners?

I'm in the process of very soon releasing a public Mt.Gox and Tradehill motion graphic to be used (Possibly done later tonight when done rendering).  There are also 2 other websites that will be graced with graphics.

This gives Bitcoin an aesthetically pleasing appearance to newcomers.  The Mt.Gox graphic looks particularly cool.

if you want to save bitcoin.

kill this forum,
and every other forum where lots of people talk about bitcoin.

There are for-profit poker rooms all over Seattle.

Then where do you think the money is going to come from? Thin air? New people have to adopt the use of bitcoin for it to work. For that to happen, there need to be people who are incubating small businesses.

The total amount of the coin is 21 million, and currently 6.8 million has already been produced, they belongs to a handful amount of people who joined this game early

This means, the game in a large degree benefit those who joined this game earlier, it is still a "first come, first get" model, no matter how technically advanced, the ownership model has no difference than today's society, this model always slave/disencourage later adapters, it's just a matter of time before people start to lose interest

Excellent examples. BTW, shorted LEXG and took a 50% profit in 2 days.

Well quick then, get into devcoin while there are still so few miners that you can mine it with CPUs, then later you too can laugh at latecomers while you swim in your huge stack of coins.

-MarkM-

What is a late adopter? The guy who come after me. What is an early adopter? The guy who come before me.

It's all relative. As long as you have enough human beings who want to adopt bitcoin, the late adopters will become early adopters and the late adopters have incentive to convince people to join in the bitcoin economy. Don't also forget that early adopters have incentive to invest in the bitcoin economy and convince people to join in. You see? This is an advantage of bitcoin, not a flaw.

This is not sustainable in long run, when most of the people joined the game, it's over

Same here. My belief that the idea is sound is not affected by the market swings. I guess I'm less manic-depressive than the traders here :)

Many people are also just too impatient. Where was Linux two years after the first release? Or any other open source project with major impact?

People are only now slowly learning the advantages, disadvantages, and peculiarities of cryptocurrencies, and how to handle them. That will take a while... You can't seriously believe that it would take over the world in a few months. This isn't a "aim for the heavens or die trying" plan. It needs time to sink in.

We're still going through the initial bumps. And I don't think the rollercoaster will end any time soon. You'll remain saner if you regard this as an interesting experiment with an grassroots free-market distributed global currency, instead of simply a profit opportunity... and realize there is nothing to be "saved".

Yeah, I too thought kiba sounded like many another pyramid scheme's spiel.

But its not over. I saw another pyramid scheme start up just the other day. Heck I don't even go looking for them and still I come across them quite often. So no, the game isn't over, far from it. devcoins can still be mined with a CPU fergoshsakes. Namecoins haven't hardly begun even to settle on a decent way to let people actually browse the sites they buy the name of. United Kingdom Britcoin, CZech Bitcash, Canadian Digital Notes, Martian Botcoins etc etc etc have not even let the unwashed masses in on the mining end of the deal yet. WEEDs and BEERcoin are still only just working the bugs out of merged mining. Etc etc etc.

The game is barely afoot yet! :)

-MarkM-

Unfortunately there's no real good way to "short" bitcoin.

i got my money from investors.

Lol, "save" bitcoin.  And how do you figure bitcoin needs "saving"?

You're still treating this as some sort of investment or get-rich scheme.  The OP is suggesting that we concentrate on its use as a medium of exchange.  If you accept Bitcoin in exchange for a product or service, and those coins can be traded for other things you need/want, how does this disadvantage you?  Granted, some of the early adopters have done well financially, but please offer us some constructive suggestions on how to bootstrap a decentralized, peer-to-peer currency where this problem is avoided.

There are many unique aspects to Bitcoin. For a few months, it was exposed to a quickly. growing audience and, consequently, grew in value, which in turn made it attractive to investors, who inflated the value even more. It now appears that many speculators are getting out. Those of us still willng to use bitcoins as currency are trading it for goods and services, and I, for one, only trade it for USD when necessary. As more and more merchants join the movement, I expect this necessity to diminish.

BitBrew is doing its part to stabilze the BTC economy by keeping prices static, come hell or high water.

If we extend the term "bitcoin" beyond the software to include all the discussions about it, then yes, it needs saving right now because of all the emotional talks about some mysterious "crash" on the forums lately. It can be easily helped by introducing a no-whining policy at the forums, though.

If you trade

Says the guy selling a $20USD cup of coffee. Through the internet. Like it or not, you have to deal with the fact that BTC can be traded for other currencies.

Sorry, but I don't understand any part of your reply.

I think he's trying to say that you said that BTC shouldn't be allowed to be converted into other currencies and he pointed out your coffee pricing for...some reason.  Anyways, you obviously weren't saying that and he was just using a straw man against you.

Anyways, I agree with you edd. All these people who worry about BTC's USD value and complain when they can buy a product cheaper with USD than with BTC are doing nothing to help to economy.  People who SELL products with BTC and not just hoard them so they can cash out some day are the real BTC heroes.

Yes, it does make a little more sense if I had said something completely different.  :P

Just to clarify: I sell premium organic and fair trade coffee, mostly in 8 ounce and 12 ounce packages. Anyone interested can do a little research and see that, even at an exchange rate of 1 BTC = $20, my prices are much more affordable than anything else out there. That is how I'm encouraging participation in the bitcoin economy.

If you accept Bitcoin in exchange for a product or service, the same argument applies - you have to offer actual goods and services, whereas the early adopters can obtain your goods and services without having to actually contribute anything productive to the economy themselves. (There's also the issue that if you sell for Bitcoins, you're the one that takes on the risk of the exchange rate collapsing due to early adopters selling their holdings and making it impossible for you to cover costs that are in USD or your local currency - and you will have costs that can only be paid in your local currency.)

It's not so simple!

The jury is still out whether speculators contribute anything "productive to the economy". In Wall Street, a lot of people get rich with speculation, much richer than any bitcoin person, and economists heavily disagree on whether this is a good or bad thing...

Bitcoin needed the early investors and miners to get where it is now.

Well, that's always true. If you are afraid of collapse of some currency, the safest is to sell it immediately after a deal. In the case of Bitcoin, there are even payment services that do this for you. By keeping the coins you have upside as well as downside risk.

As long as there's no cash in the cage (where the chips are stored) and very little personal cash is on each person, you'll be able to technically play on the Capital (like the ring to that?) lawn without fear of breaking any gambling laws--although trespassing may get you life. This would work in every state. Every bar in America can now have poker tables set up in the open without fear of being raided. Any minor details I may have missed with this idea, could easily be iron out. I think I already know the first curve ball that's going to be thrown at this idea, so I'll opt to wait for it--then hit it out of the park.