If is profitable around $5/btc if you are paying 11c KWh, but the profit levels are only about 5-15%...  Even with profits going to 30% at $5 or $6/BTC a couple weeks ago many miners were dropping out.  I think the fact of the matter is that smaller scale miners are more likely to drop out with price decreases and larger scale miners are hesitant of scaling up further their operations on something of questionable stability, leading to the drops we've seen recently in mining.

The bitcoin conference has been going well according to all the people there...  There have been some announcements such as bitcoin ATMs and means to pay for consumer goods via smart phone transactions.  By the sound of things people are making major investments into the infrastructure.

Bot is still running things... It's been 11.50$ for 36 hours if you haven't noticed.  If it deviates from that it will be pushed back to it within 60 seconds, by senselessly small bids/ask for actual users to make.  The sell wall is increasing in size because Bitcoins appear to be mined but aren't being bought up as quickly, but it's not increasing very quickly.  At the current rate it will be 3-4 days before sell wall volume is the size of the buying side volume on Mtgox.

Why the manipulation?  It looks right now like the price is being kept low more than anything else, but it's hard to say what the actual intention is.

I hope the major announcement isn't that i'm going to get f***ed for investing a ton of money into bitcoin this weekend

Still at 11.50, $331k to get to 10.50, $193k to get to 12.50 which is slightly worse of a ratio as compared to yesterday.

It also looks like there is someone botting the price to 11.50 for the past 24 hours, as any large push in either direction results in immediate push-backs within a second.

I bought at 11.50, but only 60btc

let's hope it doesn't go back to 5 ://///

or mine more, sell less.

for the same reason you peak with gold: fear of inflation/devaluation of cash holdings decreasing.  exactly the same as what happened to gold after 1980.  the reason bitcoin is popular (aside from being novel) is everyone's fear of inflation because of european/american debt problems.  as a deflationary commodity supply of bitcoin can never be excessively increased, so in times of inflation fears it appears more attractive than cash holdings because it may retain its value better until the fear of inflationary crisis is resolved.

this is true, but i'm not sure how much people will continually demand it like gold is being demanded.  we're gonna peak soon with gold and with bitcoin.

oh no, it continues...  right now we need $300,000 worth of bitcoin sold to make $10.50 but only $150,000 to make $12.50.  this could just be seller market manipulation too, though, since who knows how much people actually have ready for sale that's not in purchase orders.

there is a serious btc seller side lacking at mtgox... we're going to wall at 11.50 for a while and then i think it will spike.

edit: also trade volume is crazy so far today, we're already meeting the volume of trade for any of the 24 hour periods in the past week

For bitcoin to continue to grow exponentially at an average rate of 10% or so a month the currency we use would have to as well

not happening

but we can dream

85% or -15%

I'm a miner who doesn't normally invest, but as soon as my deposit gets to the market I'll have pumped a grand in...  Let's see where this goes.  I'm hoping to net 5-20% this weekend, but if it drops to 15% I will sell.

Deflation is more a problem for banks to deal with than for people or for a centralized system...  The big problem with deflation is for wages and for contracts involving loans/debt, but the easy fix is to just put terms into the contract with reference to inflation/deflation.

e.g. you have a loan for 1000$ at 3% annual for five years.  However, make the 3% annual adjusted for central/foreign currency or commodity inflation or deflation, so that it's 3% above whatever the currency has modified to.  If it this year saw a 5% deflation (increase in value of currency +5% or -5% inflation), make the amount owed negative 2%.  If there is 5% deflation, there should be a clause in worker contracts that specifies their wages will go down too.  This is what banks should have been doing in the first place... NOT the Federal Reserve who has been consistent in messing everything up for the past while by never contracting the US money supply.

The only nice thing about a linear supply of money compared to a deflationary supply is that early adopters will not destroy it by getting way more than anyone else...  Eventually there will be no reason to mine anymore with a deflationary curve, which is one of the long term dangers of BTC (a supply not capable of contraction).  But that hasn't deterred gold as an investment.

A better curve for difficulty may be one that is non-formulaic and ties supply to weighted global currency values and supplies, reflecting the amount of wealth presently available.  In the event of recession the output could be contracted by higher difficulties, while in economically favourable times it could be expanded with lower difficulties.  Just an idea.  You could go through economic papers and then probably hard code something that accesses currency values/supplies on the web and calculates the difficulty based upon those.  This would be a real advancement in the online currency world, instead of digital equivalents of gold or of inflation-ridden USD.

Centralized funds are fine by me as a means of getting money where it needs to go, such as lent to entrepreneurs or issued as currency such as a money order.  The more people using the currency, the more regular the price of it will become, so anything lending to enhanced utilization would be positive I think.  In the late 1700s in North America some of the bank currencies were more stable and worth more than the government issued currencies.

Another 2c:

( The deflationary nature of bitcoin is also sometimes argued on here as the reason it could not be well used for lending, but I think the only obstacle is to tie contracts to some more standardized value of goods like the USD price of wheat or exchange rate.  In that event even if the value of BTC was inflating in relation to the USD or whatever, the contract would still not require a fixed amount of BTC but rather an amount modified against purchasing power of some other unit of measure -- basically what the US should have been doing over the past years in business instead of inflating the money supply at the source which inevitably leads to the destabilizing economic disparities we see today. The point of the fed was to expand and contract the money supply as needed, but all they've done over the past 50 years is inflate it. )

I have had a number of ATI cards do this in the instance of failure

Try running occt and seeing if it artifacts at stock clocks

no, make i1coin start at 8m so everyone at least has a chance.

2 blocks total so far

Once of the problems with bitcoin is liquidity.  The idea would be for someone to produce difficult to counterfeit certificates (like actual currency) that could be exchanged for bitcoin itself.  The way it could do this would be to mail the certificates somewhere after writing your address on them, and then the BTC would sent to that address, after which the end user could exchange it for currency or whatever.  The "bank" could take 2% or whatever fee when issuing the currency or redeeming it, eg if you buy a 10BTC bill you would pay 10.20BTC for it for the convenience of a bill.

This would be one of the easier ways that BTC could be used by people to trade for real goods in real time.  This way, no long wait times for BTC for confirmations or whatever -- it would basically be normal cash that'd be easy for even non-tech saavy people to use.

Probably not the first person with this thought -- what do you guys think?  Further it'd be even more anonymous as there would be no more block chain/transaction records that indicated anything meaningful since BTC would constantly be coming or going from the "bank" to whomsoever.

difficulty: 8m