Put in more money.  That simple.  Buy a million dollar's worth a few tens of K at a time every time it dips and you'll paint the chart, drive up the price and get more people interested.  You'd get a multiplier effect magnifying your investment.  Cashing out will work in reverse, but so long as you're the first one out you SHOULD make money (it depends on how hard lemmings follow suit).

Once the price drops low enough you could do this with far less $.   Using Tenebrix as an example -- you can cause a huge rally at will with only a thousand dollars or so worth of BTC.  Last week you could do it with $100.  When BTC is at parity you could probably pull off an impressive rally with $20-30k or less.   At 10c, 5k will be enough.

I'm going off of the first MtGox hack having 500k in their trading wallet and 700k during the time of the second suspected hack.  That rate of growth maps roughly to around 10-15% and I'm using that with lots of assumptions as a proxy for # of coins entering circulation.

Of course I don't have any hard numbers, only mtgox and possibly dwolla have those.  I can only guestimate.   But IMO 50-70% is waaaaaaaaay too high of an estimate.


Look at fairbrix.  The fiat value is roughly $0, and so is the hash rate.  It took one guy to pull off a 51% attack.  If the hashing power of bitcoin falls far enough it's only a matter of time till someone does the same thing for "lulz."


More importantly, nobody would ever think of selling a car for Bitcoin.  Their risk of actually cashing out at market value is too huge.

What if I don't have any losses, only a 200% realized ROI, two free crappy graphcs cards and free PSU?  That would imply I should invest more. 

And to that I say, "OH HELL NO.  Pay me a lot more for my currently being mined coins first."

In all seriousness, I'll move on when there's no more entertainment value here.  Until then the importance of being right on the Internet outweighs only making a few pennies a month on this pyramid.

While I agree with you and got in roughly during the same time (except I was a roaring bull when the trend was UP, I only started selling once the trend looked to be broken at $24-$20) the bitcoin network is worth more when it's more secure.  Just look at fairbrix -- demonstrably it didn't take too much computing power to pull off a 51% attack and destroy the value of that network.  That currency is just as usable as bitcoin for libertarian purposes, yet has a fiat value of roughly $0 and a corresponding utility value.

Bitcoin needs to have some sort of revenue model to pay for people securing the network.  Right now that revenue model is a pyramid.  In the future we will see.  But you are wrong that the value of the bitcoin network is utterly independent of its value in fiat.  At least today.

Who the hell is idiotic enough to risk their main income for a few dollars a day?  I could see maybe if you worked at a fast food joint, but what manager wouldn't notice the vacuum-cleaner sounding PC in the corner and escort the idiot that brought it off the premises keeping the box to pay for the stolen power and network bandwidth?  And if it's the manager there's the risk of the owner finding out.

Then again, people are buying into tenebrix and will buy into solidcoin.  Doesn't matter how high you set the bar for "you must be THIS dumb to play" there's always someone who will.

If your theory is correct and the omniscient, rich manipulators are doing the price manipulation what's to stop them at $3.50?  Why not $1?  Why not $.1?

It's not in the best interest of anyone with a current large holding of BTC to drive the price down in order to own the whole network.  That has the effect of reducing the potential audience, adoption and total value of the pie.  It's far more useful to have 4 new people getting on board bitcoin than it is getting 4 bitcoins at an artificially depressed low.

No, what we've had is a few of the early adopters struggling very hard to prop up the pyramid.  Most couldn't cash out, they were only rich on paper.  Still are, really, just to a much lower degree.

Our price movement simply reflects people not depositing enough fresh funds.   This pyramid is fueled completely by new investment, and simply that's tapered off since the highs.  Bulls are talking up a storm, just not depositing enough fresh money.

Yeah, I did.  To buy 7 series GPUs or FPGA miners.  So far direct buyers of bitcoin have had their asses handed to them.  Those going long through hardware investment have had a much better outcome "long term."

$416 in GPUs -> $700 in cash + $120 in GPUs (assuming $60 per 5830s, going ebay rate after costs.  Other 2 were sold weeks ago for a 10% profit).  Let's call it doubling my initial investment over 4 months.  Although it was really over the first 2 weeks, the last 3 months have been mostly worthless.

Still not willing to admit being wrong about the $4.2 being the monthly stagnation point target.  Yet.

Yes, we will.  $5 looked to be pretty darn impenetrable.   

IMO BitMagic is right.  We've had a shift from mine-and-hoard to a mine-and-sell strategy as BTC went lower and lower from a bubble peak.  So the selling pressure on the market increased even though the dollar volume decreased.

That's why we have a month of stagnation followed by a drop.  Miners mine-and-hold hoping for a bounce.  When it doesn't materialize (and in fact they're looking a bear straight in the mug) they dump knowing they'll mine their position back over the coming month.  Possibly even increase it if other miners flee and difficulty drops.

The market may be able to absorb 1000 new bitcoins a day, but it has a hard time with 30,000 at once.  (just a wild guess that somewhere around 15% of mined coins are being sold monthly, up from 10%).  And it's a lucky thing for bitcoin that people who aren't willing to deposit dollars are at least "depositing" the cost of their electric bill.   If the full 7200 coins a day got sold it'd be game over in less than 3 months.

There's less reason to panic sell at $5 then at $10 if your cost basis is pennies per coin (as it is for all early adopters).   The only ones who will capitulate are the 75% that got in between $8 and $30.   The other 25% is only a risk for panic selling at $30+.

Or, more importantly, how many of the new owners of the 7200 will be willing to sell at today's, tomorrows or yesterday's price.

The number of coins is known, but the new owners and their sentiment are not.  Nor is the price those owners paid to acquire those coins.  If a coin costs $1 to buy the owner may be far more willing to sell it for $32 than someone whose cost basis is $3.80 but market price being only $4.11.  I speak from personal experience here -- at the top I sold as soon as I got confirms, but the lower BTC goes the more I try to time peaks and valleys.

So we know the number of coins.   We don't know the value of the network (how secure is it next month?  next year? in 2040?), the cost of operating this network ($1000/hour now), nor whether there will ever be a revenue model capable of sustaining the first two.

So, you stepping up to buy at 4.1 and sell at 4.5 all next month?  You know it's the right thing to do.  These bulls are just begging to be milked.

Have you looked at NMC once mining power fled?  TL;DR - about 5 months for difficulty to adjust down to match the current number of miners.  We ran NMC difficulty to 100k in about 3 days of profitable mining, and the remaining chumps are going to be slogging along for nearly half a year of mining at a loss to make up for it.  They'll be done around February with some luck.

Any number of people could do a 51% attack on namecoin right now, this very minute.

Even if 10% of the current miners have free electricity it won't rescue bitcoin if prices go sufficiently lower than cost to generate at 1.5M difficulty for the remaining 90%.   They're not going to buy bitcoin because it's cheaper to buy than mine, most will shut down and/or sell their rigs and forget about the whole thing.  $1.25 and you can stick a fork in it.  At $4.11 the pyramid is already wobbling pretty hard.

Weekend effect in progress.  If it flatlines at 4.1 without appreciable hash power loss on deepbit I may risk bottom fishing for coins to flip into expected rallies to 4.5.   Should be safe-ish enough, looks like this month's bloodbath has run its course.  It'll take a month for miners to stockpile again.

If the difficulty (and network utility/security) is plummeting I'm definitely not stepping up to catch knives.  The bulls are running their keyboards well enough but failing to throw sufficient good money after bad.

You wouldn't have had a difficulty growth of 400% over 2 weeks (as we did in June) if all the bitcoin value was already priced in.

Fact of the matter is: people invest and divest fiat money into bitcoin as of today, not as it will be in 2040.  People didn't  invest 200 million into bitcoin (as it was valued in June), they didn't invest 100m, and even now it was only a small % of the 37M the whole enchilada (existing coins, potential) was invested so far.

The bitcoin network takes $1000 an hour in power to run.  That has to be paid either in new cash injections or by people speculating on the future value of coins they mine.  75% of the mining power joined over less than 4 weeks.

If you don't think bitcoin price is affected by people who got in it for the money or free hardware and not some rosy future bitcoin ideal then you're delusional.

While not all miners sell each and every coin as fast as they mine it a big enough % do.  The rest still matter since they feel rich on paper and could still sell in the future.

Exactly this.  When bitcoin was at $9, $6.58 was buy like crazy zone.  When it was $6, $4.18 was a lucky buy.  Let's see what happens after it lingers at $4.20 for a month before dropping into the $3s around this time next month.

I know I'm not waiting for $6 to dump, anything close to $5 and it's a selling opportunity.

No, people don't feel that way.  Deepbit hash rate is rising again.  They may say one thing, but their actions show their true feelings.  80% of bitcoin ecosystem is thinking the sky is the limit, and this is as low as we're gonna go.

I think we need to start using 1/log (inverse log? does such a thing exist?) charts to see activity down here.  Hell, the price moved 20% today but you won't see that on the chart because it doesn't even register relative to noise movement of just a few weeks ago.

And here is where fundamentals trump technicals.  For 25% of the bitcoin community with a cost basis under a dollar, hell yeah, we're in a roaring bull uptrend.  Their invested hundreds of K are still worth millions even now.

For 75% of the bitcoin community that joined during the times BTC went $8 to $30 to $4, not quite so much.

Mining is a great proxy for overall bitcoin community sentiment.   If 80% of the miners are still mining along that means they're still expecting higher prices in the future.  High future expectations, current and increasing long positions combined with no buying -- does this sound like the recipe for a bull market?