Basically, this problem occurs because there's only one established currency, that is Bitcoins (BTC).

Every other currency are 'Based' on itself vs BTC price.

So, BTC price itself have little influence.  People will mine it if it's either 200$ or 50$.  So, unless it goes like 0.01$, where even ASIC will be power-inefficient, then BTC go on.

However, for the other coins, that's a different story.  Their prices are compared to BTC.  It's all a matter of if it's more or less profitable than the established BTC.  If it's a lot higher, like FRC lately, people mine the cr@p out of it.  Then, when difficulty sky-rocket suddenly, and profit get cut, people abandon it.

I think that to suceed for altcoins, the adjustment must be made gradual, not 4x in one shot.  But also, it should be made so that it does not bounce like TRC did a while ago.  In the end, it's really complicated!

Because FRC is old and at the time, this was not seen as a possible problem, and also because of lazyness of developers that could have fixed it by now but didn't :-)

What happened is that 2 major exchanges started accepting FRC trades at about the same time, that is vircurex.com and bter.com.  This had a huge opt-in effect, and trading prices was extremely high (like 500% profitability vs. Bitcoins, i.e. you would mine 100FRC in X amount of time which, once exchanged to BTC, would be worth 5 times more than if you mined BTC in the first place).

So, everyone jumped at mining FRC.  FRC retarget every 2016 blocks, like BTC.  FRC also has a nominal block rate of 1 per 10 minutes, like BTC.  However, in reality, with everyone mining it (a big rush in), a block was found in approx 2 to 2.5 minutes.  After 2016 blocks later, at the next retarget, the FRC difficulty adjusted to the maximum allowed (4 times higher).  And, previously, in the last 1 or 2 days, profitability had settled down to about 130~140%.  So, difficulty increase 4 times (you mine 4 times less coins), exchange rate stay the same, you end up having profitability getting hit down by a factor of 4, ending up at around 35%.

Now what... Either one of 2 scenarios really
1 - Exchange rate increase by a factor of 3 to 4.  This way, you get around the same profit.  This is good for people who mined and kept the FRC before difficulty increase.  They will get 3~4 times more BTC than if they traded before the increase.
2 - Or, exchange rate don't follow.  Mining is simply unprofitable anymore.  People abandon FRC mining.  This has the perverse effect of instead of finding 1 FRC block per 10 minutes, a block get found in 20 minutes, 30 minutes, etc.  People don't mine, and the ones who still mine don't have a total hash power to find a block in a timely fashion.  Since retarget won't happen until 2016 blocks later, you get a blockchain stall.

Scenario 1 means continuity for FRC.  Scenario 2 pretty much means death for it.  Currently, we are looking more toward scenario 2 than scenario 1.  However, FRC got that crisis a few months ago.  It took 3 months to retarget from ~9500 down to ~2375 (4 time less, maximum jump in difficulty again).  People mined it like crazy at the beginning, and then just abandoned it.  It was taking forever for any transactions from 1 FRC address to another (it takes like 6 to 10 confirmations, which is tied to the number of blocks being generated;  no blocks found, transactions takes forever).

Hope this clarify a bit

Was thinking the same thing...  Well, unless the exchange rate increase to compensate, we'll see the same thing that occurred a few months ago, with FRC chain stalled for weeks.  But back then, there were pretty much no exchanges (apart zapto/cryptonit which the double-authentication requirement pushed away a lot of people).  Now you have vircurex and bter.com that trade them easily.

So, maybe within a week or two, the exchange rate will increase.  For sure, they are now undervalued.

Well, FRC is just above parity with BTC.  In a few blocks, FRC difficulty will go much higher (it's been mined like crazy).  Probably 4x higher.  This means that profitability will lower 4-fold for FRC miners.  To stay at profit, the FRC exchange rate will have to go higher, no?

What do you think?  Would it be a good time to invest in FRC, in hope that the exchange rate raise to match difficulty increase (and have a much higher total FRC->BTC value)?

Yes, you can mine them, just choose half of the altcoins in circulation!

I'm not putting it all under the same flag.  Of course, there are innovations, like LTC.  But some of them, especially lately, are mostly pump and dump I'm sure of it

I won't name any coins, but I'm sure you know which one they are.

And, the biggest problem is that it's like those annoying ads.  Everyone is bashing them, having something to say, but it's there because it work!  People jump in.  I'm not blaming anyone here, and sure, there is a lot of money to do for the first adopters, and many of those coins get their finest hours one day or another.

Damn I wish I had hoarded those Freicoins a little longer.  Had mined like 30~40K a months or 2 ago...  Would have been worth a few thousand bucks by now!  Well, the thing is that you never know.

Here it is... the new PDC (The Pump And Dump coin!)

Well, not really, or is it?  Actually, I think most of the new altcoins (and many of the old ones) are purely Pump and Dump, what do you think?

After all, you make a coin, mine it like crazy right when it comes out (you don't even have to pre-mine it!) at low difficulty during a week or 2, get a few thousand coins, and hope for the exchanges to take them under their wings, and the value to spike.  Then you slowly dump for dozens/hundreds of BTC, and retire when it's drained of any value (diff. too high, etc).  Finally, you start another alt-coins.

Find a nice story to introduce a coin, something apparently new, but questionable...

You can even change the algorithm, so people have to code a new miner or modify an existing one, just to give you a few extra days on the edge.

What do you think about those altcoins-crazyness?

Here in Canada, Virtex does have low volume today.  For example, if you want to sell, the price is 157$, but if you want to sell 5BTC, it goes down to 149$, and there's pretty much nothing until 145$... http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/virtexCAD.html

So, it's not incentive to buy at high price.  If it start "crashing", then you're stuck watching the price fall or lose a lot selling.

... and the dump

No idea   But nevertheless, that's a lot of news...  And no bad news is... good news

Well, that's a lot of news for Bitcoins in a few days...

- PayPal president is fascinated by Bitcoin, says company is ‘thinking about’ including the virtual currency
- Presidential candidate will only accept Bitcoin as contribution
- OkCupid To Accept Bitcoin For A-list Subscription Service
- NoHo Internet Cafe Now Accepts Virtual Currency Bitcoin
etc. etc.

So far, much news are "good" news, very few "bad" news.  And it seams like since we've hit 260$+ once, people see it as doable again.  However, since we crashed not long ago, and it's raising again, it looks like the bad days are over (already!).

So, will we see another bubble (or are we in a bubble!).

For sure, Paypal accepting Bitcoins would just be insane, and make all of the Web goodies accessible with Bitcoins (and not just the Bitpay or custom Bitcoins payment processors).  Read here jump to 500$ within a few weeks!

Lol

I know what you mean...  I had 2.2GH/s, upgraded to 3.54GH/s, and still feel like I'm at the low end!  Even though I should see myself in the midrange.  I'm FPGA mining, under a Kilo-Watt, and making "only" .2BTC per day and a girlfriend tired of excessive heat in my computer room!  Can't wait for my BFL... if it can arrive before we melt down here!

Did the "getwork" interface changed?  The pool is no longer sending X-Roll-NTime extension...

POST / HTTP/1.1
Content-Type: application/json
Content-Length: 40
X-Mining-Extensions: longpoll midstate rollntime submitold
Host: pool.50btc.com:8332
Accept: text/html,application/xhtml+xml,application/xml;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8
Accept-Encoding: identity
User-Agent:BitcoinRPC miner library (Eric's proprietary miner)
Authorization: Basic [... hidden]

{"method":"getwork","params":[],"id":0}

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Content-Type: application/json;charset=ISO-8859-1
Connection: close
X-Blocknum: 232446
X-Long-Polling: http://5.9.245.122:8331/LP
Content-Length: 601

{"error": null,"id": 0,"result":{"data": "0000000269e9220c0c62b2df1f163c66b8f2ad6887765d74c1cd55d800000055000000009b1adf8 d4cd696ccad66555acccb19b65f3f5144936b2eda15507428b1341bfc5174166a1a01de94000000 0000000080000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000080020000",
"hash1": "0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000800000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000010000",
"midstate": "63f173277361284b10da8ffdc66d768485edb1c4ed56aa953fc0bb0afab30e11",
"target": "ffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffffff00000000"
}}

That make my custom miner ask Getwork every 6 seconds, that's how fast each mining node pass through all nonce.  Well, the pool seem to accept rolled timestamp anyway, so I overwrite the miner to force roll timestamp, so it request only once every minute.  But the pool used to return X-Roll-NTime extention.

I also see that it uselessly compute midstate although I provide "X-Mining-Extensions: midstate" (Which mean, don't return obsolete midstate and hash1).  Did it do that before, I don't remember.

P.S. Yes, I know, I should switch to stratum... someday...  but that mean more coding for something that is presently working fine as it is now!

And... from a long 44 hours lethargy... 2 consecutive blocks under 1½ minute   Statistics gaining back on us!

Congratulation Eligius, you have now officially entered the lowest luck ever run!  Past record was 16.8% on June 15, 2012.
Now we are at 16.5%, on a 43 hours run @ 1.7 THash/s  without a block

Well, tough luck I guess!

If you look at blockchain, there's only something like 3 or 4 transaction per block.  I don't know if that's ok...
I checked further, and the receiving side do see the incoming transaction, with transaction ID.  But that transaction never makes it to the blockchain.

The infos (on receiving side)
TX ID: ca827059c342b218fe929a2b07ea226d6dd2d0240c4ed023e891f8e863292632
Address: 144ot4wCXHP8WtLspg4nK1jZjon59YKsMp
Type: Receive
Balance: 255.1883539


Edit: Hey!  It finally made it!  After many hours... 

e-mailed too, no reply...

Right now I've switched to solo mining.  I don't thrust coinotron until my FRC shows up, they always have problems, down, etc.  Unfortunately, there isn't much any other FRC pools.

Oh well, solo is unpredictable on short term, but let's hope I'm not unlucky...  Should pop a block every 6~7 hours.

I have a 255FRC transaction going out of Coinotron that's not showing in the blockchain also