Hmmm, didn't someone suggest that?   

Thank you. "I have always relied on the kindness of strangers."
(not really, but the quote seems apropos in context    )


We all live in interesting times nowadays. 

Oops. I see that I didn't really *directly* respond to either of the questions posed.

That's because I don't really believe I can. (With excellent chances of being correct.)

I've done the best I can. Take it for what it's worth, please.

I make no claim to successful predictions.

However, some of my posts in this thread have been as Lucifer's Laywer. (I hope y'all are all familiar with him.)

Full disclosure, I have mined some and I have made speculative purchases in both the PrimeCoin and PissCoin (Oops, is that DickCoin? - I don't much like the name; can you tell?     ) spaces. NOTE: I have filled my targeted level of exposure in both those markets for a while. We'll (I'll) see how my positions play out over the next year or two.

Now, to respectfully respond to your questions.

1) I see a transition to GPU, or better yet FPGA, mining as a 'good thing'. Because it is *slightly* harder on GPUs, IMO, to do that with a bot-net (and totally not viable once FPGAs become predominate) and more significantly because it completely shuts down the "spin'em up as you want'em" VM game.

2) I can offer no advice. If I could read / interpret those charts with a high degree of success I would be a rich man day trading with real money.

Yes, I'm quoting myself. 

Looks like a price floor is building back up at around 0.0021 to 0.0025. Not thick yet, but it is building instead of collapsing.

This won't be the last crash / opportunity to pick 'em up for cheap, folks.

Data will be much better after a month into the game.

Don't run more threads than your architecture can natively support.

I have an 8 core xeon (dual quad-core) without hyper-threading capability. Therefore, the best I can do is "setgenerate true 8" or "setgenerate true -1". And I've generally run at 7 (or 6 if I want to watch NetFlix) since this is not a dedicated mining system.

Others might comment on their experience with newer CPUs with hyper-threading.

bitrich, difficulty is now about 30 fold higher than it was first day.

So, if it took you one day to get a block on day one, it could take you thirty days to get another.

+/- depending on Luck.

-- edit

This is Solo Mining.

A lot different than mining in a pool.

Not unless there is a demand.

Not unless people will pay for them for speculative purposes or so they can <do something> with them.

Difficulty does not in and of itself drive price.

Yep. I think you nailed it as a strategy.

Of course, it still remains to be seen whether there will be a demand, buyers, longer term after the 'IPO' speculators.

And that's my point with:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=251850.msg2724186#msg2724186

Atta-boy, GSnak, that's the way to do it.

<lol>

Well, that was a pretty quick crash.

At or below 0.002 on all three exchanges now.

I hope all y'all with a monthly commitment to pay for VM's have made your nut by now. 

Well now, he implied that he'll buy all available under that price point.

Therefore, happily, if his money is where his mouth is, there is a solid price floor we don't have to worry about falling through.

 

-- edit

And, IIRC, someone else also made pretty much the same statement of "I'll buy everything at or below 0.003.". But I'm not gonna bother going back through the thread to find it.

-- edit 2

Now here is someone establishing a true price floor.
10,000,000.0000    0.00000003    0.3000     

grep is good

Gold has an inherit store of value.

Bitcoins have value because you can buy stuff with them and they now have a track record of enabling both on and off the record 'fiscal' transactions.

Finding cunningham chains for fun while generating primecoins as a by product does not produce a *demand* to purchase coins- which is what is required to drive price - but merely increases *supply*.

Why would they want that?

No.

Any number of examples can be given where "expansion of collective knowledge" is a useless endeavor of no arguable benefit to either the individual nor mankind as a whole.

Please play again.

I.e., narrow the scope of your statement sufficiently and I might even agree with you.  

Then one block is still being mined every few seconds. It is just a question of how distributed is the set of people receiving those blocks.

One of my comments on the previous page is relevant.

-- edit

As is the clearly evident attempt at market manipulation in progress on the Vircurex exchange. (I'm not watching the other exchanges, but assume that equivalent games are in progress there, also.)

With BitCoin, you would have had an assured remainder of 2048 blocks to benefit from the 'arms race' of quickly pumping up compute power above what the average miner could supply.

This seems to be working well as a demonstration of the value of a continuously adjustable difficulty.

But it was never argued that there was any intrinsic value in generating hashes. That was merely the mechanism chosen due to being computationally expensive and having a mathematically provable output for input.


IMO, the subject line of this thread is just marketing glossy paper BS. primecoin is no more "scientific" than any other numerical computation. (I welcome links to serious papers, not SK's 'Sunday Supplement' level one, which refutes that assertion.)