Bitcoin Forum

Put your "money" where your mouth is and send your Bitcoin to me  ;D .

 ::)

THOUGHT SO!

We're still printing them at a quarter million bitcoins a month,  even if they are worth .00001 cent each. 

If someone can logically answer why there is no mechanism to slow down the rate of printing then I want to hear it.

if you think bitcoins will reach $100 or whatever, i will gladly sell you all of mine for that price instead of the shit price they are going for now.

thought so.

the argument works both ways, man




i dont think btc is "over" but i also dont think its going to be recovering any time soon...

There is such a mechanism.  216000 btc per month is not that much, it is less than 3%. And this percentage decreases every month.

Because Satoshi Nakamoto didn't add that feature and changing the rules of the entire system that existed since the beginning will upset many people who don't want the rules changed.

Please show me your most recent buy order from any other currency.

then you just pointed out the biggest flaw in the bitcoin algorithm.

Even the US constitution has a mechanism to add or remove items from it..   IE: change the rules.

It's reaching the point where a few of the mining pools might make the decision for us if this continues....

They would rather get 2 BTC per block at 50 dollars... rather than 50 BTC at 2 BTC. Because the amount they have sitting on their machines now would increase as well.    Trust me I did the math.

If they reduced the payout to 2 BTC and the price did jump up... it would increase the amount of dollar per BTC for the 100,000 of them they have on their machine...  

Hi didn't?  I disagree.  He put the codebase under MIT licensing.  Just get a majority of users to switch and you can have anything you like.

---

Parenthetically, I see this 'new rules by software upgrade' as one of the enormous advantages if Bitcoin.  If the system is abused beyond a certain level, there is a 'nuclear option' available to the community as a democratic institution.  This is _not_ an option with gold as a store of value.

Carrying on this thought a bit more, it seems to me that if a large mining pool somehow held together long enough to maliciously destroy the currency, _that_ would be enough to convince a majority of users to 'upgrade' their software to a version which would ignore a malicious block chain fork and 'recover' albeit with some collateral damage.

Because it's irrelevant?

At price 10$ with all miners regularly selling, buyers have to put 2.16 million USD a month to keep the price stable. 1.08 million USD for 5$/BTC and 216k USD a month for stable 1$/BTC. PRICE is the mechanism, not printing rate!

Because there's no need for it. The market is efficient and will reach an equilibrium value of BTC that acknowledges the large liquidity infused each day by mining.

But wait, a large herd of people approach and they are yelling "buy Bitcoins, we'll all be rich !". The price spikes to a level that can't possibly be maintained against the daily liquidity injection of 7200BTC. I guess markets aren't that efficient after all, and occasionally fall pray to a speculative bubble. There's a quick fix: the price has to fall back to it's natural level, dictated by net cash inflows into the system. Luckily, The Designer made it all automatic, you don't have do anything, except loose money if you are one of the balloonists.

In short is not the rate of printing that's too high, it's the price.

No man... it's not irrelevant...  it's the basis of the entire experiment.    If it falls to pennies or lower... it's game over for all of us...   We have two choices at this time.

1 - Exponentially increase the market size,  get VC money into bitcoin companies, widen the adoption rate of bitcoins to exceed $1.5 million a month of investment,  and trading of BTC.  (that's the figure that would have kept prices stable at $6 per BTC) 

2 - slow down the rate of printing.

Pick one or both...  it's not like any of us have any other options if we want BTC to survive.   Facts are facts man... and the fact is that BTC will hit the point of no return if one or both of the above or not done.   There really are no other options as it MUST be one or the two...  the option 3 is do nothing and watch it go to the wrong side of critical mass.

How's that working out for them?

From my limited experience, people who want to change the rules are trying to change them in their favor.

Isn't the market rule enough? If you think Bitcoins are worth more than the current price, buy. If you don't, sell. What's the problem?

You get 50%+1 then you can make whatever rules you want....so.....its up to you.
Personally, I would strongly disagree that its a problem.Maybe you forgot it was just a few months ago where people were saying the 'printing' was too slow!

This is a vote of no confidence.....which makes sense. Perhaps one day, people will wake up to that and reorganize.
You are suggesting that, par for the course for most bitcoiners, you dont want to do any work and have others do the work for you. Well, Im not going for that, and it looks like not many are either.

My vote is against the Mr. "what have you done for me lately" Satoshis , the "pie in the sky/koolaid" scammer Bruce Wagners, the idiotic lets exchange USD for BTC for USD crowd..and all of the rest of the ideas that do nothing for the long-term bitcoin picture.

Yeah instead of cashing out your bitcoins guys just send em to the OP. He will definitely take them off of your hands.

What a stupid proposition for people to do if they believe bitcoin is over with.

The rate of printing coins is one of those constants that, if tampered with, would undermine confidence in the entire protocol. Very bad idea to even think of tinkering with such a thing. The market price is the variable, and the market decides what it will do.

And suppose the price started rising rapidly, would it then make sense to increase the speed of coin printing? No.

The market price of Bitcoin is what it is. We ought not try to "tinker" with the rules just to hold it higher than the market otherwise prefers.

To anyone who believes in Bitcoin, a falling price is a godsend opportunity to acquire more. It certainly does not indicate that the core constants of the protocol ought to be messed with.

THANK YOU!  You just proved my point!!!   if the price goes to almost nothing... it's not the sellers that are the problem.. it's the buyers.   So the market will do exactly what it's supposed to do.. shut down non-functioning parts... such as bitcoin.

Why?

Either bitcoins have use as a currency, in which case they can be used at any price and gradually greater use will equal a higher price or they have use as a pump and dump get rich quick scheme, in which case yes they are doomed.

False. Having +1 over 50% does not grant you title like that. This is a common misconception. Rather, the more of the hashing power one controls, the more likely it is that he/she can fork the blockchain and alter things. It's a gradient with a focal point at the 50% mark... but the 50% mark is not a guarantee of takeover.

Thanks for correcting me on that. It was a bad strategy anyway the more I think about it. Better to think the mechanism is to adopt another cryptocurrency or get invloved in world govts. The thing about changing it is we end up with the US dollar in the long run.

Doomed from what? Being a scammer jammer community?...I think clearly bitcoin could easily make a comeback in a broader sense if it adheres to solid economics.

Will it be doomed from taking over the US dollar? Hopefully.....with the right expectations it could produce. No more pie in the sky, but actual value and people I think will respond....is it going to be hard? Well its going to be harder than sitting on azz and expecting to be rich. The majority of bitcoins is going to have spend on investment and there is going to have to be accountibility.

The one and only reason Bitcoin has real followers it that the money supply cannot be tempered with. It's also the only advantage it has to centralized fiat.

Furthermore, the fact that this is infinitely more important than how inflation occurs is its only defense against copies (with different inflation curves) randomly inflating the space.

It is possible to change the rules.  There have been discussions on how to transition to a new hashing algorithm if SHA256 gets busted.  It can be done.  But just like the Constitution, the change will only stick if an overwhelming majority of users use the modified client, essentially voting for the new change.  Just like the Constitution, the changes can't be forced upon people by a small cabal.

(Un)Fortunately, I think a majority of users would switch to a new client if we found cryptographic insecurities, but not for changes to the established monetary policy.

As I've already said elsewhere BTC are dropping in short term view because there are people who need to sell (miners who needs to pay energy bills) but pratically noone who needs to buy (the BTC market is really poor at the moment). Big offer and little request make price very low on every market.
Aside that point price is dropping on short period (4 months or less) but 6 month and 1 year performances are still good (and I'm one that enter at 14-16$  :-\ so big loses 'till now). Overall I'm quite confident that prices will mantain low for at least a couple of months (maybe even lower than today), but then will begin to rise again.

I think you've misunderstood Bitcoin. Completely.

This price of BTC is irrelevant to its function as a currency. If you believe it to have been an investment, that's your gamble.

Spot on.  The role of a currency is to be both a long-term store of value, and a short term medium of exchange.  To be a store of value it needs to have stable prices, and to be a medium of exchange it needs to be easy to use and exchange.

If it's worth 0.01 US cent, it doesn't matter, as long as it retains that value over a long period of time and people use it in exchanges.

Right now we have neither:

The money supply is inflating, last I checked, by around +37% a year (as of a few days ago; obviously that number will converge to zero as the months go by, but 37% inflation is still significant).  At the same time, Bitcoin is getting all kinds of positive and negative publicity, resulting in fluctuating demand.  Right now we're in a deflationary period as a result of all of the bad publicity.  This rapid inflationary pressures and fluctuating deflationary pressures means the currency can't hold a stable price.  Security issues are also at the forefront as no significant third-party solutions have come forth and I haven't seen much commitment from the developers.  In the future when inflation dies down and demand stops fluctuating so wildly, we'll see significant price stabilization.

As a medium of exchange, it's also weak: there's little to actually buy and the services available to facilitate those transactions are untrustworthy at best, outright frauds at worst.  Basically what we have is a bunch of lone techies writing code in their basement, not professional companies creating products; this does not mean we won't have reliable facilitators in the future, but the fact is we just don't have any now (in my opinion). 

Bitcoin isn't useful as a currency now.  The most investment and focus by third parties is in BTC mining and exchange right now, as is to be expected and as is necessary, as developed mining and exchange is absolutely necessary for the short, medium, and long term prospects.  When the economy has developed enough to allow convenient BTC purchases in supermarket stores I think Bitcoin will be just about 'ready' to move from a mining-based, long-term investment to an exchange-focused currency.

+1
Let's get on with building a better currency and dump the "investors" who keep watching the daily price and imagining they'll soon be rich. Send them back to Wall St. What Bitcoin needs is price stability.

What we still need is easier ways to get in/out of Bitcoins worldwide. I'd like to be able to send BTC to someone in another country without them having to transact back into a (US?) Bank and withdraw thru their ATM. We need a worldwide network of walk-in exchanges much like you can walk in and convert US$/YEN/BAHT/...whatever just about anywhere you go. The biggest boost would be for agents like post offices to handle BTC like they do Western Union/Moneygram or similar transfers. Can you imagine worldwide instant money transfer without ripoff 5-10% fees?

+1

As both a merchant and investor in the Bitcoin economy, the price DOES matter.

I am only exposing one of my 3 businesses to Bitcoin.

When the price was above $16 US, I offered 0.5 BTC per kg of my product (beef) (10% discount)
When the price was above $9 US, I offered 1 BTC per kg of my product

Today, I changed the price to 2 BTC per kg.
With a shit house derivatives market, I MUST keep changing my BTC price.  That pisses me off no end.

Personally, I think I BTC = 1KG of prime beef, but my bottom line will not take it.

The price discovery phase is still in motion and I expect something as radical and AWESOME as bitcoin will require at least another 6-9 months for the real trading to begin. 
Around about March 2012 which almost ties in nicely with the reward reduction to 25BTC.

This doesn't say price itself matters, just that price stability matters.

I laugh my socks of at all the would be central bankers here, a whole squad of timmy's and benny's in waiting.
Early day adoption of Bitcoin has proved to be painfully volatile and may be for some time yet. This is a child concept struggling to learn to breath in and out regularly. Miners will stop mining people stop buying and these swings will recur to a large degree in the growth of this child concept of bitcoin. Is bitcoin going to die... NO ..but yes it may grow much slower than many imagine...

The only day i will walk away is when you start central planning..

AMEN

Sometime the subtleties of the English language mean jack shit in the "real" world.

Point taken though.

If you know of such a mechanism, which

• can be enforced easily by each node (bitcoin's security system)
• does not depend on a centralized data source (exchange rate eg.)
• is not easily influenced by people who want to take advantage of it (eg. rate/size of transactions in the block chain)

then I want to hear it.

Done.
You should have received a whopping 0.95 BTC. (It was all I had :) )

Wow. Now I want to start a thread like this. http://payb.tc/jeremy

hope not, I've got .80 Btc stored there :(

This subtlety matters though. Some people claim bitcoin is doomed if the exchange rate drops any more. In reality, though, all that matters is that the price stabilises somewhere. Whether that's at 0.01 USD or $1000 USD makes little difference.

Some people, who are used to dealing in multiple currencies, don't even think that matters. While $/€ might not move more than 20% over a few months, you still have to hedge for currency volatility just as with Bitcoin.

But how do you hedge for Bitcoin volatility. There isn't any functional options or futures markets yet. I know there's talk about it but when I went looking they weren't functional. You would need something that can offset Bitcoin price changes.

As much as I "enjoy" the ups and downs of the Bitcoin ride, I really do hope it stabilizes soon.

if you are concerned about btc to usd rate fluctuations, you can hedge your position temporarily staying in usd
i.e. check how silkroad protects it's sellers from exchange fluctuations

That's the same as not having a BTC position - which doesn't help with hedging. The point of hedging a position is to pay a small premium (like insurance) against adverse moves, without compromising any beneficial moves. eg. owning an option to sell close to your buy price prevents substantial loss if the price drops, but you still gain if the prices rises. You only lose whatever the option price would be.

Granted, in this volatile a market the option prices would be very high (if they existed).

 :o funny!