Bingo.  There will always be someone to mine, even out of idealism.  We have proof -- just look at namecoins.  Anyone currently mining namecoins (rather than mining bitcoins and buying namecoins) is giving away more than 30% of their processing power.  Soon they'll be giving away 70% of their processing power.  Not everyone is motivated by profit and income.

As long as there's some usefulness at all in the bitcoin network someone will mine.  Plenty of people have spare hardware and "free" power and network access.  Not everyone's cost basis is the same, and for some even $0 is enough incentive to mine.

Wouldn't it be easier to use batteries designed for solar installations to charge at your employer and use them to power your rigs at night?  Depending on how meaty of an individual you are (or want to become) it may be possible to lug a few thousand kwhr a day out that way -- a 380 amp/hour, 20 hour 6 volt deep cycle battery is only about 110 pounds.

Walk outside your house.  Look at a power meter.  Make notes of how much you use per week while mining.  That'll give you a rough idea how much your system uses.  Divide that by 7 and again by 24 to get kW/hr.

Then remove the GPU, and idle your machine for a week.  Take same measurement, and try to keep other power usage constant.  Once again divide by 7 and 24 to get kW/hr.

The difference between the two will be a fairly good estimate of how much your GPU pulls from the wall.  You'll have to adjust that by your PSU's efficiency at the guestimated whole machine consumption (you can derive it from the second figure and a test with NO machine turned on as well for a week) to get a more accurate picture of your GPU's power consumption.

Or you could just look for reviews.

I'm holding out for billions; possibly trillions.  If Bernanke has his way that'll buy me a nice dinner at Taco Bell.

After careful deliberation I agree that the ONLY thing keeping bitcoin exclusive and all of us on this forum from becoming gajillionares is a 100 or 1000:1 bitcoin split.  And people like me in our ivory towers.</sarcasm>

Even in the US people have become sensitized to "kilo", "mega" and "giga" (and soon, "tera" and "peta") as prefixes which denote increasing size.  They may have to whip out a calculator to convert, but they all know giga > mega > kilo.  They are capable of grasping the concept of "milli" and "micro" and "nano" as prefixes denoting smaller sizes.

Outside the US (and last I checked the rest of the world is quite a bit bigger than countries still using Imperial units) people have no problems with the concept of "deci" (1/10th), "centi" (1/100th) and "milli" (1/1000ths) because they're exposed to the concept of decimeters, centimeters and millimeters (and *liters, etc) all their lives.  If someone wishes to express their penis length in millimeters they can do so instead of saying something like "my wang is but 0.12 meters long".

The US population could well be dumber on average, but isn't so cretinous as to have decimal points being the only thing stopping you from buying a helicopter with your bitcoins.

Real programmers write their trading bots in Malbolge.  Open source or otherwise.

Here's "Hello world!" in Malbolge:

('&%:9]!~}|z2Vxwv-,POqponl$Hjig%eB@@>}=<M:9wv6WsU2T|nm-,jcL(I&%$#"
 `CB]V?Tx<uVtT`Rpo3NlF.Jh++FdbCBA@?]!~|4XzyTT43Qsqq(Lnmkj"Fhg${z@>

Think you're up to the challenge?  If not, may I recommend LOLCODE?

Mining is most popular on old, obsolete AMD cards (5 series) which AMD doesn't make a whole lot of profit on two years into their lifecycle.   The current 11,000 gigahash power of the network is roughly equivalent to 30,000 5830s.  If we assume each one brings $100 to AMD (bad assumption, there's more to the card than just GPU and there's profit for board makers and retailers in that.  However, many mine on 6990s and other much more profitable 6 series cards, so I'll go with that) we're talking 3 million dollars.  Noticeable, for sure, and there's a benefit for not having those few thousand 5830s clogging up the channel.  But a blip on the radar compared to what Bulldozer means to the company, succeed or fail.

TL;DR not the best idea trading AMD based purely on the tiny niche that bitcoin occupies.

There's only so much second guessing and self-contrarianism you can do.  Once pricing starts behaving in such a way that obvious analysis no longer applies then it's time to step WAAAAY back and take another look at both your strategy and whatever it is you're trading.

You're looking at a market with roughly 6000 participants.  A very easily manipulated, unregulated and somewhat opaque market.  One person's changing sentiment can mean the difference between being right and being wrong short term, and daytrade time frame charting simply can't cope with that.  Plus, this is a strongly trending item -- do you adjust your charts for the long term trend?  If you don't apply trend-adjusted logarithmic smoothing you could be looking at a stable or slightly increasing pattern on a chart when in reality the price movement is down based on a long term trend.   Another reason I don't consider absolute price points of weeks or months ago as exact resistance or support levels.

I don't think the BTC market is big enough to day trade.  In swing trade time frames or longer the pricing movement is still rational and predictable.

That said, IMO the sudden transition from explosive growth in both difficulty and pricing to an effectively zero variation flatline isn't natural.  Bots have nothing to do with that, all they do is narrow the ask/bid spread.

Oh, and OP: you're wrong.  If bitcoin doesn't go to 0 it's going higher.  The long term trend has not been broken and shows no sign of weakness.

Ok, having been inspired enmanku's excellent and clear long term trend charting I got to looking for oscillators with any usefulness whatsoever in confirming or denying short term price movements.  Here's what I've found:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg90zvzpsztgTzm1g10za2gTMAzm2g25zi2gUOzi3gCMFzi4gMFI

This pretty much backs up my gut feel (and my gut is currently full of excellent Chinese food, so I'm not sure I'm getting correct trading signals at this time).  Two of those indicators signaled a sell on the 10th at $20 (and a buy on Jun 3 at $11, fwiw), the third a sell on the 26th at $16 (and a buy months ago at like, $0) -- confirming the down trend, and haven't turned bull yet.

Check out the Chaikin Money Flow one in particular.  Notice how it was consistently above the zero line during the long term up trend, but has been well below during the recent down trend.  If you draw a support trend line on the oscillator betwen the 4st and the 11th we may even have a divergence where the indicator slope is slightly down, yet the price trend is up.

TL;DR: I have no worries about missing a massive upside trend just yet, no worries about intra-day Brownian motion and no regrets about being in dollars rather than BTC.

I'll bite.  A synthetic gasoline, were such a thing possible would be just as useful to me as one refined from crude as long as it had the same performance characteristics.  So yes, it is the energy and form factor we value.  It just so happens that oil is the best and cheapest way of getting it.  In the future it may well geothermal or tidal or fusion (ok, probably not) that ultimately results in vehicles moving, materials refining and homes heating.  Oil in and of itself is not hugely valuable -- do you think someone living in pre-industrial times would rather have a gold mining claim or rights to drill for oil?

I (and many others) define speculation as exchanging an accepted currency for some commodity at some price hoping for a larger amount of the original (or equivalent) currency in the future.  The key point here being: miners are increasing their speculative position when they hoard.  Adding to a losing position.

All analogies break down at some point, which is why they're analogies.  Still, we humans use them to wrap our heads around strange concepts, and for that use I think my analogy is apt enough.


Again, BTC isn't the thing with value.   The service, the ability to send funds securely using the internet with no central authority is the valuable part.  I can create my own BTC on my own block chain, and they will have zero value because it's the company (in this case community) that's backing the service.  It's the same reason my credit card is usable as money.  If I were to draw my own credit card on a piece of plastic with crayon I'd be rightfully laughed at.  People buy into Visa's ability to shuffle money around.  People are starting to buy into the BTC community's ability to shuffle money around.  Visa stock has value to stockholders and potential stockholders.  BTC has value to BTC holders and potential BTC holders.

The big question is: how quickly is the stockholder equity growing?  Can we project revenue (that being fees on transactions in the Future) and how likely it is to grow?  Is our customer base (in this case synonymous with stockholders) growing or shrinking?

I view the company as very healthy at the moment with bright future outlook, but currently overbought.

I assure you, quite serious.  I'm now going back and trying to do MACD on a log scale over the same time period to see if I can confirm or deny your crossover indicators.  I suspect there will be quite a bit of confirmation.

Tulips in Holland were a commodity too.  Bust happens.
And you are right, I deserve to be fired out of one for that brain-o.

More serious answer: bitcoins are not a stock, they are one of the products produced by the bitcoin community (company).  When you invest in BTC you're investing in that ecosystem/community/company.  The block chain is worthless on its own, I can create one myself and mine it all I want.

That community (company) does have debt and operating costs in various forms, although the former is harder to quantify.  That community can absolutely become defunct and disappear, rendering the products worthless.

Edit: I keep editing this back and forth.  BTC are the stock as well as the product, to some degree.  The founders cashing their stock can re-invest back into the company, making this analogy really really stretched.  So yeah.  We'll go with something I've never seen before.

You know, usually I smirk and repeat the old saw about log charts showing anything you wish to see.   But that was just pure art.  It's hard to find fault with the way you've drawn the trend line, nor the staring me in the face pattern.  I'm in awe.  That makes my crude charting look like bison drawn on cave walls with feces.

There you have it, technicals and fundamentals seem to agree.  Now is not the best time to buy.

Because nothing like this has ever been done before.  There is definitely intrinsic value in a commodity that is not controlled by any central authority, can not be easily counterfeited or subverted and can be sent in real time to anyone in the world with internet access.  The promise of bitcoin is very real, and if this service was provided by a company I could see not just myself but plenty of others investing in such an outfit pre and post IPO.  

This being a distributed grass-roots effort rather than a corporation doesn't change things.

But that is still a possible future.  The current situation is now.  One is potentially bright, the second not quite so much.  Sometimes even promising companies make poor short term investment opportunities and excellent shorts.

I think of this as a brilliant tech startup where the founders have 90% of the stock, and the investors providing 100% of the capital have 10%.   With the stock price determined completely by the company cash on hand (which is 100% infused by investors) and currently at a near all time high, several thousand % higher than a few months ago.  Oh yes, the founders able to sell their shares at any time.  With more stock being issued at a steady rate (albeit a smaller and smaller fraction of the float).

Would you be one of the investors now or wait for a better opportunity?   I'm not. Of course there is risk of never getting on board -- but then, one of the major cannons of trading (if not investing) is to never fall in love with a stock.

Don't run Windows on any machine you have your master wallet on, create a separate account JUST to use that wallet, only log into that account to send funds and never to web surf or run executables and you should be safe enough. 

In fact, boot a live CD of some oddball, pre-bitcoin, tiny market share OS like Dragonfly BSD from '09, use a USB drive for your encrypted home directory, wallet & bitcoin installation and you should be safe from common wallet-stealing malware.

Indeed, this is prisoner's dilemma meets free market.  As long as everyone hoards and nobody sells artificial scarcity means everyone looks wealthy on paper.

Problem is, right NOW this pyramid is starting to wobble.  2/3 of the mining capacity is less than 30 days old.  We newbies aren't the faithful, we've got power bills to pay and hardware to re-invest into if we want to catch up to you old fogies.  With [H]ocp possibly even more "easy money" miners are coming in.  This means that while in the past the vast majority of mined coins were hoarded that's definitely not true now.  We really could have most of the mined coins being sold within a week of being produced.  In which case, without fresh injection of funds, you'd see action much like what you see in the market -- someone stabilizing the buy side with fake buy walls (and notice how other 'buyers' are too timid to step far away from that wall) while they themselves slowly cash out.  I saw a 400+ coin buy taken out quickly, while the tiny orders were left alone.

Short term bear, long term bull is my take on it.  Trees don't grow to the sky.

You can thank me later.  It was my last 2 bitcoins in the world, sold at 13.88 that kicked it all off.  I kissed them goodbye, told them "see you shortly!" and sent them off with a bot.

[H] tested popular high end video cards likely found in their forum member rigs already.  5830s are great bang per buck but they are absolutely AWFUL gaming cards in $/performance, $/watt, $/heat... Any metric you want to use.  Manufacturers had a real hard time selling them until the $99 pricepoint and bitcoins came along.

If it wasn't for bitcoins you'd see them 10-15% more expensive than 5770/6770s, which is roughly how they perform in gaming (the primary use for a high end consumer graphics card).

Which is why [H] didn't bother including them.  They didn't test 8800GTs and 4890s either, and I'd expect those to be far more popular among their readership than 5830s.  As far as 5850s and 5870s -- you can't buy one today, not for any reasonable amount of cash.  Seems perfectly sensible not to include unavailable cards.