Yes, seasoned and experienced traders all know the way to get rich is to catch falling knives, and double down as they follow the downtrend reducing their per coin cost.  If no bounce materializes, switch to a very long term hold strategy.

You should all do this and PROFIT!

Just now?  Welcome to pyramids 101!  Bitcoin may not be a sham, but the pyramid built on top of it sure is.

If you invested dollars into bitcoins I thank you for my free graphics cards, power supplies, electricity and spending cash.  Still optimistic about cashing out into a dead cat bounce -- why haven't you doubled down at these price levels and reduced your cost per coin?

I agree!  Prices this low are not at all a value trap. Please buy hard, then hold & pray.

Wow, this is the first poll where most respondents aren't expecting 50-100% returns shortly (unlike every previous dip).  May be nearing a bottom after all...

Or unless you want more bitcoins for a lower price later.  I've been selling since $24, and along the way it's been all like, "thank you for selling me cheap bitcoins you stupid miner."  They were "cheap" at $24, $22, $20, $17.5, $15, $13, $11, $10.9... And with a bit of luck, $8 (although that's starting to look unrealistic).  You're welcome, and thank you for all the money you highly intelligent direct buyers.

The currently available FPGA miner can produce bitcoins for 20c at today's difficulty.  Factor in Moore's law and a looming difficulty nosedive and how long until you can get BTC for 2c/coin?  Power cost per coin isn't going to hold price up forever.  We miners will always be able to produce 7200/day -- at least until some time in 2012 when that goes to 3600/day.

Oh great.   If we go with the usual internet statistic of 1 person conversing for every 100 lurking, if I just convinced 100 people to wait till Wed to sell and they each have about 2-4 weeks worth of mined coins... DOOM!

I'll be the second one to admit a loss then.   I speculate on the "Tuesday effect" having noticed weekly highs are more likely on Tuesday in the AM mountain time than any other time of the week.  So I sell 80% of my accumulated position by Wed.  This is speculation.

Last week I was too busy to sell.  I'm now looking at around a 30% loss on a week's worth of coins.

And I'm going to do it again!   Muahaha.  Because doing the same (losing) thing over and over and expecting a different outcome is the definition of a successful trader.

I'm going to risk waiting for the 'Tuesday Effect' (which on this week should be Wed.) -- doing that has been treating me well.  Feel free to taunt me if I'm wrong.

I believe you're not alone -- and this is exactly why technical analysis works.  I'm far longer than I want to be, and looking at volumes it looks like a vast majority of "sell every day" miners are in the same boat we're in.

Which means the pressure keeps on building the longer bitcoin stagnates or slowly declines.  Slow pain is far far FAR worse than a quick surgical massive drop that reverses instantly - which is why the last visit to below 6 was not capitulation.

So I feel comfortable selling at $8 knowing full well this isn't the bottom.  It may be the bottom for a week or two, but give it more time and we'll see below $7 again.  Unless the trend reverses -- but then only a fool would cling to outdated analysis and projections.

TL;DR -- I believe my upside of selling at $8 is larger than my downside, so no changes in strategy yet.  Y'all feel free to hoard. =)

The average bitcoin miner is living hand to mouth?  Really?  REALLY?

Fact is, most everyone educated enough to analyze bitcoins and enough disposable income join the community is not hurting for cash.   A few tens, hundreds, thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars plus or minus a month is likely undetectable noise to most bitcoin enthusiasts.

We're far more likely driven by ego, entertainment value, etc etc than a $40 power bill.  Which for me, at least, does not come on the 1st of the month.

And people forget that's the point of charting.  Patterns, once formed, are *lagging* indicators of price.  They're good for confirming trends and forecasting where price *might* go *if* trends remain unbroken.

Some indicators give signals which have a high correlation to a trend reversing.

Chart reading is NOT a time machine.  It's a way to assign probability weights to higher, lower, or same prices over a time interval.

That said chodpaba's charts and forecasts creep me out.  They're eerily predictive.

Namecoin miners have shown that they're willing to mine with a negative 40% return (as opposed to mining bitcoin and buying namecoin).  Also, an FPGA miner you can buy today has a 90%+ gross margin at a BTC price of $3.   So I'm not sure your point is valid.  I believe the bottom will be determined completely by traders and not by the cost to produce BTC.

It's a reasonable gamble.  The number of bitcoins generated a day is irrelevant "long term", the only relevant part is the cost to run the network (about $1000/hour today) compared to the revenue.  The current customer base is about 18,000 people which is roundoff error when talking world population and revenue is also $0.

So the question becomes: are we increasing our customer base as well as present and expected future revenue?  If so, the whole enchilada (21M coins) increases in value.  If not, then the opposite is true.

You misread my points as a whine.  I'm also about people who put effort into spreading awareness and building bitcoin infrastructure being rewarded for their effort.

The OP claims $7/btc is an opportunity to join the real early adopters (whose marginal cost was pennies/BTC).  I'm simply pointing out that's at least two orders of magnitude from being the case.

Trading in isolation is a zero sum game.  For every loser there is a winner.

With bitcoins currently having a negative revenue stream (power to run the network is an ongoing cost -- IIRC it's around 10 megawatts at 10c/kwhr(?)) anyone breaking even has already beaten the odds.

Yup.  Often the huge bid walls go up whenever someone needs to sell.  At least so imply the various accumulation/distribution stochastics.  Look at the Chaikin money flow over the past 30 days -- it's an unending sellfest.

That said it's been several red days in a row.  We're overdue for a dead cat bounce.

Plenty of people would love the ability to short bitcoins but probably like me feel the odds of actually being able to assign a put on bitoptions is nil.  I felt very comfortable selling every bitcoin I had at 10.9 over the past few weeks, so it's not a far cry from there to short some, hedged by mining capacity.

Hell, if that was possible at $30 I'd have about 10-100x the mining hardware I have now, all paid for and then some. =)

It's relevant when for 80% of the current bitcoin community bitcoin has only existed for about 4 months.  Even as a long term investment it's possible to increase the ultimate payout by adjusting your position to reflect present reality as you go along.  I'm a long term bitcoin bull, but I've been SELLING over the past few months.   Today, the same money I made selling would buy me 2.5 as many bitcoins as I've sold.  And unless the short and medium term trend reverses soon there's a good chance I'll get 3x, 4x or even 100x as many coins for the same investment.

I don't know about you, but I'm feeling pretty smart about myself right now compared to the buy & holders.

I have been doing just that with alternate block chains, actually, by investing GPU power.  Also, how viable would it be to mine even 10 BTC with a CPU part time?  Don't answer that, we all know.  Even iocoin is at least an order of magnitude more expensive today than bitcoin for "early adopters."

No, I'm saying the risk higher today, with the reward many orders of magnitude lower.  Nothing against people who made bitcoin what it is today getting a larger piece of the pie, I'm just saying it's come too far too fast.

Are you honestly going to compare mining with hardware you already own to investing hundreds of thousands/millions of dollars for the same piece of the pie?  Heck, I'd have done the first at least part time if I had heard about bitcoin in 2009, it would have been 0 risk investment for a 0 return on a lark.  I was doing distributed computing back then for no expectation of payout.  There is absolutey NO way I'm investing real funds into bitcoin at current price levels.