the elitist with deep pocket will not be making any money either from mining as the Fiat/BTC ratio drops. 

Soon you will be able to get a condo on the moon, it will be made with a 3d Printer which you will be able to purchase with bitcoins.  A true libertarian geek utopia!

I am not sure I get that either.

ASICMINER is dropping since it is very much leveraged to the Fiat/BTC ratio which is in a nosedive. 
Less Fiat, means less money to buy new hardware
Less Fiat, means less money to pay for R&D
Less Fiat, means less money to pay for electricity and labor costs
Lower Fiat/BTC, means more cash flow has to go to the above, means lower dividend, means lower stock price

The short-term looks ugly and I bought some puts a couple days ago, already in the money.  Mid and Long term all depends on a combo of the Fiat/BTC ratio and the ability of friedcat to continue to keep ahead technologically than the competition.

We are now in the mid 60s with a low of 65 today.  The speed of this drop has been extreme. 

The Bear argument for ASICMINER is playing out faster than I even expected.  For the reasons I stated in the post at the beginning of this thread, ASICMINER is essentially a leveraged play on the Fiat/BTC ratio - when BTC goes up on value, ASICMINER will rise even faster - however the same is also true in reverse.  I think ASICMINER will overshoot to the downside too the speculators and the lack of liquidity.  We will be seeing a price in the 2.0 to 2.5BTC range by mid-August.  I think the value of Bitcoins will unfortunately reach the mid-50s by then as well.  Hopefully, there will be support there - those are my buy prices for both the bitcoins and the stock (55ish USD & 2.3ish BTC respectively).

The concentration of mining power to fewer players will be a negative since all the gpu miners will stop mining bitcoin and either sell their gpus (will be great prices on ebay for 7950s!) or mine an alt coin

I think they should also make a rule that if any investor has 50,000 shares of the ETC (a basket), they can convert it to the actual Bitcoins for a small fee (0.25% or something).  In this way, it would make trading the ETC really more the equivalent of holding the underlying bitcoins - otherwise I think the ETC is likely to deviate significantly from the NAV in what will likely be a fairly thinly traded vehicle for bitcoin investment.

True it is not really an ETF, more what they call an ETC - sort of like the GLD or SLV. Shares backed by basket of the commodity held in trust.  The trust charges a small fee for holding the bitcoins (basically security costs of the vault) and administration, then the market sets the price of the ETC.  Each shares will be equivalent to 1BTC (each share is 1/50,000th of a basket and each basket contains 50000BTC.  I am guessing each basked is a single paper wallet containing 50000BTC, kept in a vault with a high level of security. 
The problem is this is merely the filing of the paperwork for the ETC, it still needs to get approval from regulators.  They are being very optimistic (or reckless) trying to get this listed in the US, I think a european listing would be more likely to succeed, but I guess they want the liquidity of direct access to the US markets.  Anyway, I think politics will enter this and approval of the ETC is very unlikely.  If it were approved though, this would bring in a whole new class of speculators and hot money and add even more volatility. 

I do not think it will get down that low, though in the low 60s I would be a buyer assuming no new bad news

Interestingly, just in the last 24 hours the arbitage opportunities between the 4 major USD exchanges by volume (Mt. Gox, bitstamp, btc-e and CampBX) have all but vanished during this vicious sell-off.
http://bitcoincharts.com/markets/currency/USD.html
Looks like there is a bit of a bounce and plateau now - the question is will it hold the weekend - hell, will it hold the next couple hours?

Why because that was the "flash crash" level?

So, I bought some Asicminer direct shares for 3BTC, in less than a week they went to almost 5BTC and I sold them.  A 60% profit in a week would just seem piggish to let ride.  Looking at ASICMINER's meteoric rise, especially in the last month, it really is priced for an optimistic scenario.  However, I see several significant negative catalysts which can cause a sharp fall - panic selling in an illiquid market:

1. The tumbling Fiat/BTC ratio impedes ASICMINER's ability to buy new hardware to maintain its total % of the total network hashrate.  In the last 6 weeks we have gone from $130s to $70s. At some point, the relationship between the Fiat/BTC ration and ASICMINE Share price will rubber band back in place if the Fiat/BTC price does not significantly recover.

2. The technological "first mover advantage" of ASICMINER has very front-loaded benefits.  No doubt, early ASICMINER investors between both dividends and the exponential share price rise have been very much enriched.  However, now other ASIC suppliers are finally starting to ship significant numbers of ASIC units, many with significant performance advantages to ASICMINER's proprietary hardware.  ASICMINER is a technology company and you are basically betting they will continue to innovate and stay technologically ahead of the competition if they are to maintain their network hashrate percentage.  KNCMiner, Terrahash, Avalon and even some of the BFL units are superior.  And new more efficient ASIC chips are coming all the time with plenty of eager buyers as the bitcoin awareness raises outside the crypto-libertarian geek world.

3. Everyone wants to compare this to P/E of a Nasdaq listed technology company where a P/E of 15-25 for a fast growing company is reasonable.  However, their is absolutely no regulatory oversight and the risks inherent in investing with ASICMINER are based totally on the trust one places in Bitfoundation and its leadership.  They have shown themselves thus far to be trustworthy (though for the paranoid, that is how the long con works), but the lack or oversight and accountability means this will always trade at a significant discount to a listed company.

I would not short this company outright since it definitely has momentum on its side and friedcat has continuously met and exceeded all expectations.  Still, this stock is due for a pullback and it will be vicious.  Buying some puts to play the volatility may be a good risk/benefit play.  My bet, we will see 3.5BTC/share before we see 6.5BTC/share.

every round of panic selling has some sort of trigger - true panic selling begets panic selling of speculators, particularly those buying on margin or with automatic stop losses in place.  Still, tere must have been something to trigger the initial plunge in prices with the huge uptake in volume that has set the selling off, right?!

The Mt. Gox news has only improved over the last week.  They went from freezing all USD withdrawals to continue processing, albeit slowly, on a manual basis while they work on opening a new bank account.  Also, they are making moves to comply with the us AML provisions.  Listen, for the last 6 weeks, this has gone from $130 to $70s.  However, today and in particular a span of 2 hours, the volume quadruples and it sold off from high 80s down to the mid-70s in a couple hours.  That is a sign of panic selling in an illiquid market - the quesion is, what was the news or precipitating factor which started this panic selling?  It could even have been a single or couple of holders dumping and driving the prices down.

It really seemed even though it was tending down all day, it outright crashed between 5:30pm and 7pm EST with a huge spike in volume.  I was wondering if Mt. Gox gave some news indicating more problems with USD withdrawals or something else occured.  Why would the GPU miners be selling out today in particular?

The price has gone from $91 to $76 in thelast 24 hours, with a large acceleration of this drop in the past couple hours.  Looks like a massive dump with panic selling in illiquid market.  Volumes way up too in last couple hours.  Any news I am missing?!

Thanks will out the transfer request to Friedcat when get home in a few hours.

Only 2 left and reserved by tuoy unless payment not received by 10pm board time. if he voids his bid by not paying, then they are yours.

Has the main dev team discussed these ideas at all? I think we all see the blockchain size will increase exponentially as acceptance of bitcoin grows.