awww, if you start mining it, it'll make it harder for me (lol)

I do a little i0coin mining each day for fun - I see it as a random interval generator - time between blocks doing some solo-mining.  It might be worth nothing, or next to nothing. 

Yes, a bit hard to deposit i0c's into btc-e atm.

This looks fun, so I placed my bet - shame I couldn't use iX, i0, name or SC 1.0 and had to use BTC. 

ixcoins and i0coins could be worthless - that should not be a surprise to anyone, it is a high risk area to play in and no one should be upset over the loss (or perceived loss).  I have some coins, even some SC 1.0's and namecoins sitting around somewhere, and will probably never do anything with them. 

DoubleC isn't forcing anyone to withdraw their coins, and if someone wanted to pay his costs of keeping the exchange open (but not trading), then the coins could sit there, but that doesn't make sense.

I wrote a nice post yesterday, but lost it because I had a connection fail - so this is the shorter version.  It covered the fallacy of assuming more coins would increase the value.

If you look at a company with 1000 shares at $1 each, the value of the enterprise is $1000.  It does not magically increase if there is a 2 for 1 stock split.  Same with currency, like the US printing a whole lot of new bank notes.  What do they call it - quantitative easing?

So taking a maximum capitalization of BTC at $210M, and current $5 * 7,000,000 coins, means a drop of only $145M.
Note also, that with one block mined, 50 coins could also be the same $210M - that wouldn't be taken seriously, but the argument is that there is some $210M created somewhere before it fell.

Thanks for the service DoubleC.  We've traded BTC together and I've used his exchange.  The 5 cent transaction fee for withdrawals is trivial, and people could leave their coins there is they wanted.  No one promised they would be worth any thing.

I think I have his BTC address on my email somewhere to donate to.  Anyone want to buy some potentially worthless i0coins?  Possibly becoming a collectors item (lol)

I did a post including the example of Stockton CA property noting the price fall in the GFC.  People make commercial decisions based on needs and wants, but even in property transactions some buyers would want to pull out if they suddenly thought the price was suddenly higher than their perceived value.

Even at a small scale, I had some computer components I was buying via auction and the seller had a fit because the winning bid was less than he thought it should be.  They failed to complete the sale, but they were 15 years old and an $80 loss was way to big for him to suffer (I just had to find a different set of SCSI discs elsewhere).  Nothing to do with value of coin, but just arsehole traders.

So, if we can fix the problem with people doing the buying and selling backing out of commitments, then we could look at volatility of the payment method.

For some random reason I was thinking about this again.  The argument is intrinsically flawed, as even if all of the value of a thing was done at a clearing price, the currency is relevant.

In valuing companies, the capitialisation (shares on issue times price) sets the total.  Only the most naive would think that a new share issue would somehow magically make the company worth more.  Take a company (Apple, Nike or something).  If the share price is $100 and there are 1000 shares, then the value would be $100,000.  But if they do a 2 for 1 share swap, the company does not suddenly double in value because people adjust the price per share they are prepared to trade at.  If you believe otherwise, send me all your money now to save you losing it to someone else.

Even taking the bitcoin spike of $30/BTC and 6M coins that would be $180M (I'm being generous).  Now there are some more coins (7M-ish) and the value is around $5/BTC, so $35M.  A paper loss of $145M, not $175M because the price is adjusted for the new issue of coins.

On the flip side, back on day zero, with 50 coins from the first block, at some unknown price, they represent the $180M of "value", just the price was below the value, or at $180M total, it might have been over-valued.  This difference of opinion drives a lot of trading and keeps other markets churning.  BTC is just one of those, and a small one.


I was thinking about showing the "lost" value of the USA in yen given a 20%+ change in price (exchange rate) and with all the extra dollars that have been printed to provide some context.  It will be large, but the number would also be pointless.  I also considered a place like Stockton CA where property prices fell 30% - goes to show you don't want to invest in something so volatile if you are going to worry about volatility too much - after all, if the USD and property is so bad, it's amazing USD works as a currency (read with heavy irony).

Ok, local goods: When I go and buy petrol this morning, do I tell the gas station owner I won't pay his price because it might be cheaper tomorrow?  We have lots of local taxes, but a the underlying is still quite volatile - not necessarily on a day-to-day basis, but often week to week.  - Just providing it as an example.  Countries that import fruit often see similar moves affected by weather (supply/demand stuff).

BTC second string - I don't think anyone has argued it will take over the position of a major local currency.

Hi E-Bob.  How does survey/opinion stuff rate.  I was testing a couple of questions to some international friends this week and was thinking about widening it to some crazy place like this forum.

Specifically I was looking at people who get one bill from their electricity lines company and a different one from the power company.  (It relates to a piece of work I was doing).  For example, Denmark has separate billing, as does Rhode Island, Delaware and Maryland.  I was interested in other deregulated areas (eg, UK, Australia, New Zealand, other US states, europe) and providing a bounty (in bitcoin) for responses - say 0.1 to 1.0 BTC depending on the information content.

The economics are simple for me, I get paid more than the cost of the coin.  Anyway, that is the idea - but it wouldn't run for 6-8 weeks.

On that basis, people shouldn't buy in USD because the value is dropping (or if you prefer, replace USD with some other currency)  Don't buy gold, the price of that is dropping too!?  sure?

So, buying cross border with exchange rates, someone might have bothered to notice there were 5% swings last week in major currencies, I don't think that stopped global commerce. 

Update, fixed the rpc error I was getting and have done some solo mining for fun, but on I0coin rather than BTC because that would have been a waste of effort with a few Ghash.  First day reasonable results on two boxes, second day sucked and that was with a lower difficulty.  However, it's not a big diversion of resources given it's only $10/day at the moment.

Quiet now, you'll spoil the argument.

Kuhn-Tucker conditions - necessary and sufficient.  Necessary to ignore because it is sufficient that it is late and I've been drinking - mmmm vodka/lime.  My previous cat liked malt whiskey.

btw - old-miner has it right - it works for him, and that is sufficient, therefore not necessarily optimal, but constraints satisfied, therefore an interor solution to his multi-dimensional problem.

um, is the web calc flawed?  From the calculator:
_______________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________
This represents a net loss of $209,999,965.00 from peak to this exact moment (updated in real time) of the entire bitcoin economy.
If Bitcoins were stable at their peak of $35 on June 9, 2011 , the bitcoin economy would be worth $257,530,000.00 rather than $35,846,278.50
_______________________________________________________________________________ ____________________________

My simple math notices the 209,999,965 number doesn't change and $257,530,000.00 minus $35,846,278.50 = $221,683,721.50

Also, if the market was worth $210million and is now $35million, most people would say it is $175million lower. 

Yes, the OP talks about investing in new equipment, and how it might not be logical to invest when the short-run price is below long-run cost.  However, this occurs often.  In a field I work with (electricity markets), people will spend $500 million on a power station with a long-run cost of $100/MWh when the price is $50/MWh even though it is not logical to do so.  They should wait until the price is higher.

However, once built, and with a SRMC (short run marginal cost) of $30/MWh, they have a marginal positive benefit when the price is above $30/MWh.  i.e., if the the price is $31/MWh, run the damn thing and make a $1.

For bitcoin mining, if the price of bitcoin is greater than the short-run cost of production, people will mine, hence the focus on electricity cost.  But it doesn't make as much sense to buy more hardware.

And the cats have both a sunk cost and a variable cost, but not much bitcoin output - I should turn them off (no, I don't think so).

If short run marginal cost is below what you can sell for, you produce more.  You hope to recover your "sunk" cost over the life of the project.

My cats still like the warmth from the computers.

because they want to buy them

I have some (both mined and purchased on an exchange).  Will I ever do anything with them?  That's a different question, but I do have stuff in my house I've paid for and don't use.

I had to give up on B7 because they were costing me too much money with their bad trade engine.

If there are a series of bids or offers, you need to do them one at a time or it will do all of them at the price you enter, not the best price.
and
I was trading USD and EUR and it would randomly execute my EUR trades as USD causing the trade price to be significantly different from the actual USD price.  e.g. Selling at 4EUR is different to selling at 4USD!!

Their "support" claimed it was something I was doing, despite my showing them the trading logs.

thanks E-Bob, that made me laugh - nice for a friday afternoon

Fear mongering, hmmm, well obviously the virus writers are going to target I0coin and divert their bot farms onto i0 until the expected completion time goes over 100 days like namecoind (http://allchains.info/) - should take long to do a few hundred blocks at 1000Ghash and then drop out again.