Yeah, just seeing that small snippet saying that they now accept bitcoin is still very much exciting. I recall seeing that commercial during a commercial break during yesterday's Final Four games so this is serve as a catalyst to at least interest people in bitcoins.

Even though, the coverage is relatively "little," I personally can't help be feel all giddy seeing it. It's kinda like when I go to a food cart and see the sign that says "bitcoin accepted." I can't tell you how many times that has swayed my decision on what to eat at a food cart plaza.

There definitely has been a clamor to sell at "low" prices with the intent to buy at "lower" prices. But yes, in the end, mining is a long-term play and the sale of equipment is a factor is making ROI. Now it's a matter of consolidating equipment to address many factors that are upcoming in the next few months (a new generation of ASICs, the impending summer months, and speculation on the BTC conversion rate).

I agree with this sentiment. There are strong downward pressures on the market which forces some to sell and some to buy-in at a lower price. This and the two points that you've made inherently balances the point of equilibrium. I still think that there is a strong amount of support that is on the horizon and bitcoins change from a speculative tool to a tool with further and further enhanced utility. Once the monetary balances shift in the favor of utility rather than speculation we will see an upward trend in the price of bitcoin. This shift in paradigm will be what rallies bitcoin to the future.

This is great news to hear. Thank you for updating us. I'm glad that you got what was rightfully yours and I'm glad that Coinbase did the stand-up thing!

You should change your thread's title to reflect this update. Once again, thanks for informing the community about this and providing us updates!

This is so very true. Banning giveaways in the altcoin section was one of the best things that could have happened. That's a form of "needless promotion" that the shills have had a hard time of circumventing. Of course though, they try very hard to do so.

You may also need to be careful about 3.6.4 in conjunction with this issue. From your chat, it seems that the transaction was cancelled. Following that, you have clause 2.4 that gives Coinbase 48 hours or more after you request your Bitcoins to return them to you to initiate another transaction.

That said, your sale of 60 BTC may nullify your "right" to retrieve the difference as it can be argued that you willingly waived your right to the previous amount by performing another transaction. Once again, this is not legal advice, and I highly recommend you consulting a practicing attorney to see what your options are.

Understandable. Very valid point. To me it just seems like there are more and more "shill" accounts that seem to be contributing. But that honestly could be because I'm so jaded by a lot of that scene. I can't tell you how many times I see a post say "this is great idea" and I'd think, "Who's sockpuppet are you?" And then I'll see all of the posts for "pools" trying to trump each other and I just go, "Gah!" And the same goes for exchanges and so forth. Nonetheless, you're right, fundamentally, they have just as much right.

*crosses fingers for new software*

[In full disclosure, I still go to the Altcoin section because I'm masochistic like that; but it does make me sad to see so many people falling into what I feel are "obvious" traps.]

When I asked about the deleting the sub-forum, that was more of an introspective question admittedly. But it does have "meta" implications.

I suggest the thing about limiting posts just because of the traffic that goes there. Part of me feels that the bandwidth of this site would be better served if it didn't have to put up with the thousands and thousands of meaningless posts in that one child board. Plus, it would force "serious developers" to provide their own website infrastructure instead of mooching off another site.

@SaltySpitoon: Thanks for letting me know that. I agree that spam would go elsewhere. I just hate seeing so many people being "cannibalized," that's all. The amount of "crap" that goes on there kinda leaves a long-lasting taint on a lot of things. But I understand. Once again, thank you for your feedback.

I actually have a thought on this.

Paying to get in is never a good idea (as it forces unfair balance) and it'll just be one more thing that the cloners and pump-and-dumpers will factor into their "costs." In the end, it'd barely eat into their profits.

My idea is to limit each new thread in the "Announcements" sub-forum to one page that only the creator can edit, and only once a day can it be edited. This may be unfair for those who are promoting a service rather than a coin, but even those threads have been inundated with spam posts and "crap."

Active doesn't necessarily mean "productive."

What is counter-intuitive is having so much "crap" that it causes more trouble than help.

[Addendum for possible further discussion. Added June 12, 2014:]
I don't mean to "necro" an old thread, even though it is one that I originally created, but I thought it'd be okay since it's on the same discussion point.

I just wanted to see what the folks in Meta thought about this idea.

So I actually spent some time doing some number crunching and noted that roughly 68% of the bloat in the "Alternative Cryptocurrencies -> Announcements" subforum came from "Newbies" posting on threads created by other "Newbies."

Here is the idea: make some sort of viewing restriction on Newbie accounts to not allow them to View/Post on ANN threads made by other Newbies unless it's your own thread.

Part of me knows that this is quite a bit draconian, but it also seems like a good a way to help stem the tide of legitimate newbies from being scammed by intentional cloners. It also helps to address the rampant amount of bloat posts. And finally it also helps to address some of the newbie clonecoin ad campaigns that I've seen happening more and more often (a nifty little work-around that has been going on to subvert the "No-Giveaways" policy). [Mind you, I know the third issue has been taken care of adequately by the signature restriction, but I guess every little extra thing helps or something.]

---

So, during my lunch break, I decided to give myself a headache by perusing the "Alternative Cryptocurrencies > Announcements" subforum and there are some staggering numbers: over 250 threads in that one subforum have had activity within the last 12 hours.

As several points of comparison, the "Bitcoin Discussion" forum has had only around 50 threads and the "Alternative Cryptocurrencies" parent forum has just under 100 in the same timeframe.

With that said, what does that say about the state of affairs of the altcoin community? We're full of spammers and scammers aren't we? Maybe we're swinging back to the point where this forum should be deleted?

[I wish I could get a table extract so that I could see how many posts were made by user activity demographics.]

[Edit:]
@malevolent: Thanks for moving this to Meta. I wasn't sure where was the better fit due to the questions I had. Part of me wanted to know what altcoiners introspectively thought of themselves, and part of me wanted ideas on addressing the clear amounts of spam in that forum/sub-forum.

This is quite unfortunate. Looking at this, upon first glance, in the best case this is incompetence and design flaws whereas in the worst case, this could be downright market manipulation and possible fraud.

That said, in terms of the legal aspects, if your coins were showed as confirmed in your Coinbase wallet prior to selling, then you should be entitled to the amount that you transacted that day. However, there may be a clause in the ToS in which if you accepted your coins back you “willingly” revoked the contract of the original purchase price that you were entitled to.

I will assume that the burden of proof (in alignment with the ToS that you agreed upon) is on you, but from what I can gather, you may have some sort of case.

Please do not take this as legal advice as this is not what I am providing you; consult an attorney on what your options are and provide as much evidence as you have.

This:

and this:

Just another scam brewing.

I agree with some of what has been said. As an example, GPUs mining SHA-256 doesn't run as hot as those running scrypt (and also uses a smidge less electricity).

With that said, does it mean that the miner isn't optimized? In the sense that "significant" improvements can be made, part of me says yes; there may be quicker opportunities to tweak the vectorizing. But this may be limited to an extent based on how the architecture interacts (I may be missing something regarding threading, so I'm not entirely sure.). Does this mean an already more efficient miner exists and only a select few know about it and use it? Wouldn't necessarily say yes, but I would say that's more likely with X11 than scrypt.

[I also want to call shenanigans on the lower draw; it seems much lower than what would make sense. However, this is from what I can gather, haven't had the chance to peruse everything in the source (and admittedly won't take all of the effort in doing so).]

I have to disagree with this in general. I think that there will always be a demand for a "alternatives" for various reasons. Whether it be market competition, personal appeal, or varying “utility,” I can see room for many different coins.

Even for coins that share the same algorithm, in terms of a market space, it seems that there will always be places for them. Sure we can make the argument that it purposelessly fragments the market, but market fragmentation is pretty much a given in so many different things and it seems to work just fine. (We could additionally get into issues about the perceptions of monopolization and so forth, but that can be saved for some other time.)

That said, from a security standpoint and aside from merged mining, it’s pointless to have more than one coin running the same algorithm without some sort of “exterior” defense from attacks. So serious consideration must be made in this regard.

As a side note, 28 pages is not really all that much. Hell, during university there were times I would have to read upwards of a 100+ pages a day. In my current work, myself and many of my peers have to read documents of tens of thousands of words.

I hold the same sentiment as many others here have. If it goes down, I buy more. Simple as that.

That said, I for one don't get more than I can afford losing. So that's one thing to consider. I wouldn't take a loan out for speculation purposes. That just seems like a very vicious cycle to get into.

I have a good amount of feedback that I'll try to provide in the upcoming days on this.

Overall, this was very well organized and provided nice insight. Some sections could be beefed up and some of the arguments aren't as cogent as they could be; however, there are many valid points brought up in this paper. This was a really solid read.

I'm not so sure about a sharp rise to be honest.

However, I do agree that there will be signs of an impending strong rally during the middle of the month; and I agree that it will be more sustained.

With that said, I don’t think we’re out of the mud yet. I still think there are some lurking things that will suppress prices for a little longer. It may take a little longer to see a clear upward trend (rather than a rally); we may see that as soon as the end of the month or the beginning of next month.

Answering the question about where the money is going to come from, I think the money is going to come from the transacting potentials that will continue to come from bitcoin. The fact that Square Market is partnering with Coinbase will act as a somewhat of a catalyst for the price of bitcoin in a similar fashion that Overstock did. I wouldn't be surprised if Square takes a similar approach and keeps a certain cut of the revenue they make and leaves it in the form of bitcoin. That, it seems, would help to provide some of the backing for the next rally.

[As a quick note, the prices were still "dropping" when Overstock came into the scene. But that's because the conversion rate was just way too artificially high. I think we're approaching that point where the overall floor has caught up and the next rally won't be as high, but it won't be as unsustainable at the same time.]

In general, for a lot of the other coins (i.e. alts), there tends to be a slew of spread out orders in the low values on the chance that the market dips so they can in essence capitalize on a dip (kinda like a short).

I don't think this is the case with this; I tend to agree that this is more of the work of a bot acting as a "market-maker" of sorts.