Is it possible that having all this HYIP activity might be driving up the price of bitcoins?

I have long had the impression that being used for HYIPs can be quite effective promotion for an online currency, albeit as in e-gold's case it can also maybe have a downside eventually.

Could it be that Pirate, or the powers behind pirate, have a few million bitcoins, or maybe more than a few millions, and hit upon the idea of giving some of them away as "interest" as a way to increase interest in bitcoins and actually drive up the price of them as more and more people buy some in order to get in on these high "interest" rates?

I haven't checked all his exact terms; if I was free to pay back everyone at any moment and shut down cleanly thereby, and had a way to make over 7% a week, maybe it would be useful to borrow at 7%, make over 7%, taking my cut of the profit in fiat, then do so again next week rather than risk any of my own profit, safely stored as fiat, in the next week's operation? As soon as I hit a bad week I could shut down or decide I have enough reserves built up to risk another week...


-MarkM-

It seems short-sighted to worry about profits now, instead think ahead to when they are worth a dollar or few dollars each. Maybe it will take a year or two, maybe not, maybe a lot depends on how long bitcoin takes to recover back to the $30-and-up it had a year ago, until that happens it seems cryptocoins in general are still suffering from last year's big "crash".

-MarkM-

It seems I didn't tar/zip the old devcoin-qt to put on my sourceforge downloads site.

It is however still on github:

https://github.com/knotwork/old-devcoin-qt.git

It seems to work fine for me, so if anyone wants a GUI version of devcoin - with the proviso that mining is disabled in the GUI version due to thread problems that would make it crash if mining was enabled - grab it from that github repo...

-MarkM-

Weird, my i0coin daemon isn't using a lot of RAM right now. I had had troubels with i0coin in the past but right now it seems very well behaved. Maybe its your turn to do a restart of it or something as I don't know what changed but lately I've had no trouble with it.

-MarkM-

Well bear in mind the attacks on alt chains have forced many to avoid actually going public in altchain format until they have enough transaction volume to get enough hashing power to protect them. That unfortunately has kind of slowed down experimentation lately.

-MarkM-

If you want a coin that does not reduce rewards over time, use DeVCoin and/or GRouPcoin.

Bitcoin does reduce reward over time, and has no need to change since anyone who does want rewards not to drop can simply use DeVCoin and/or GRouPcoin, without even interfering with their ability to continue mining bitcoin, namecoin, i0coin, ixcoin etc at the same time.

-MarkM-

For the umpteenth time: there are already at least two blockchains that do not reduce mining reward over time and that are merged-mine-able: DeVCoin and GRouPcoin.

-MarkM-

At least read the frikkin posts if you are gonna pretend to be responding to them. Sheesh.

-MarkM-

Lost coins are not really a problem, there are already so many chains all of which can be merged-mined at once that losing a few coins on each chain really doesn't amount to much, especially if you also take into account the fact that the number of chains you can merged mine at once is not yet saturated; mining a few more is still easy, we have not hit a point yet where the sheer number to merge is too many to do it practically. (We have however found that ten second block time chains are not practical to merged mine alongside more-normal blocktime chains.)

-MarkM-

The trolls trolling about it are full of crap anyway, they don't even bother to mine the coins that do feature the very feature they claim to favour, so they are just noise, trolls, crap, waste of bandwidth.

-MarkM-

This is crazy, miners can already merged-mine both DeVCoins and GRouPcoins alongside BiTCoins, so they can mint two of these always same number of coins per block coins right alongside their bitcoins almost free; there is thus absolutely no point whatsoever screwing around with actual bitcoins in such a way.

-MarkM-

This change has already been made, so the problem is already fixed. Just use DeVCoins or GRouPcoins instead of bitcoins, they already provide this feature.

-MarkM-

Sure thing, thanks! bJ2DzyEDFUwQ9qHFJ7yAxskbKo2nRLMdGz

-MarkM-

Where on vircurex do you see that? I cannot find it. As far as I know my Open Transactions server is the only exchange that has markets for all pairs of its supported assets.

-MarkM-

Both GRouPcoin and DeVCoin keep on minting the same number of coins per block forever. So "inflatacoin" already exists, in two denominations, one producing 1000 times as many coins as the other per block.

-MarkM-

Well lets just say GeistGeld is the last on the list of coins to merged mine, not worth looking into until you already have bitcoin, namecoin, devcoin, groupcoin, ixcoin and i0coin all humming along nicely...

-MarkM-

I merged mined it once upon a time, but had to stop as it screwed up the merged mining in general.

I tried again a week or two ago. It uses way more RAM than other chains, drives all the chains into over five second delays that mess up the p2pool merged mining for all the chains. I figured to do it I would need to put it on a totally separate machine from all the other chains, plus, it would need to be a big enough machine to run two copies, or I would need two such machines, so it would have someone to talk to so it could mine, since there were no connections out there to be found so I myself would have to run two so they could talk to each other. (The daemons wont mine if they have no connections.)

So if someone is out there mining it, they are doing so without incoming ports open.

And raking in all the coins like I used to.

-MarkM-

It is still ridiculously underpriced, only now starting to recover from the big loss of confidence that brought it down from the $30+ it was at last year...

-MarkM-

That is part of why we need ASICs. If it happens while peopel are still wondering whether to invest in ASICs it could be nasty, but once everyone and their dog has ASICs maintaining the network will be dirt cheap as far as actual running costs.

-MarkM-

Yeah its still chugging along. You can merge in i0coins and groupcoins too quite nicely by the way.

-MarkM-