I never said it would be easy but it just might work and it really would be in everyone's best interest. In real world commodities there's an original producer for every good we trade and that producer has to make a living too, so they represent a floor below which the price of that commodity can't typically drop. Even if we ignored the upper-bound idea of preventing bubbles from arising with our combined power we can at least prevent the bubbles from destroying the market when they burst by agreeing on a minimum acceptable price, based on difficulty.

Hell maybe "union" is just too strong a word, maybe just putting up a web site that does the math and calculates today's rate would be enough. If enough people start referencing it and using that value as their minimum acceptable price at least it'd put a floor on the market.

I would love to, if the infrastructure were available in the other currencies we all rely on right now.

Also, I was perhaps talking less about the "certain time frames" and more about the "certain ways" (http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15595.0  <- shameless derailing plug of my own thread about unionizing mining)

How about community enforcement? If enough of us (especially if we got all the miners onboard) refuse to do business in certain ways or certain time frames then there's no product to buy during those windows.

Of course there's always a more "organic" price fixing scheme... Miners are a lot less like investors and a lot more like workers or small business owners, so let's just start a union: http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15595.0

No need to fork the network, just realize that the miners are essentially the same as anyone else doing a job and reserve the right to unionize like any other labor force:  http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=15595.0

I'd also like to add my personal suggestion: Historically the market seems to have had no problem supporting a price of difficulty/25,000 or so which right now would be $22.69/BTC. These bubbles are usually temporary but they have to be resisted by some kind of market pressure or eventually one of them will cause a downward trend so bad that it drives the price lower than what is sustainable for mining. Remember, miners aren't just "printing money" we're also building the block chain. No miners = no bitcoin. It's in all of our best interests that we keep this at least somewhat profitable for miners or else the whole thing could fall apart.

In light of the recent downtrend in the value of BTC I've got a proposal to help turn things around. These bubbles and their associated bursting are not our fault, my fellow miners. We want nothing more than to mine some bitcoins and sell them for a reasonable profit over our cost of equipment and operations. Most of the miners I've talked to are not the "get rich quick" speculator types. Sure we'd like to make some money but we're also in this thing for the long haul (at least I am). To this end I propose a sort of solution. I propose a union for the purpose of price-fixing in an attempt to stabilize the market value of bitcoin.

Every day something on the order of 7,200 BTC are generated by mining operations. If we were to assume that the vast majority of miners are acting in a for-profit manner and selling their generated coins this would account for 10 to 15 percent of the total volume of BTC traded on MtGox in a given day. While certainly not the majority this is a strong enough percentage that we should be able to wield some influence at least over the market.

I say we agree on a difficulty/price ratio that will allow us to make a reasonable income in return for our efforts and absolutely stick to it. In both directions. If speculators try to increase price too far beyond our agreed-upon limit, they will likely fail as at least 10% of the market will be selling at a lower rate. If the market attempts to dip below our rate, at least 10% of the market will be resisting the dip. This will hopefully produce the kind of stability we need in this sort of market. Price per BTC will suffer fewer fluctuations and will only rise or fall as a factor of difficulty which, of course, is a factor of the number of people mining which is a factor of adoption rate.

It might work, it might fail. We might have enough power to demand a fair price at market and we might not but I think we owe it to the community to at least try. Who's with me?

Edit: As it turns out my idea wasn't much like a union at all, more of an educational effort regarding the VALUE of bitcoins as compared to their PRICE. To that end, I've obtained http://bitcoinreference.com and set up a redirect for the old btcunion.com domain. You can all stop defining the term union for me or giving me your opinions on unionization, whether bitcoin miners constitute a "workforce" etc.

Jewelry would have limited effect on gold price if it weren't for "collectors demand" having already driven it up. There are plenty of pretty shiny metals that are corrosion-resistant and many are significantly better for the purpose than gold itself. Gold is too soft, for example, to be used in most jewelry without being alloyed with other metals.

Oh, and "collectors demand" is another way of saying "speculative value" which is another way of saying "bubble."
The intrinsic value of a baseball card is the cost of paper and ink. The intrinsic value of an old coin is the value of its metals. Any value above this is only in the mind of the investors.

Edit: The main point I'm trying to make is that gold's use in jewelry didn't make gold expensive; gold is expensive and therefore we use it in jewelry as an adornment to prove our wealth and status.

It's only politically incorrect here because there are a lot of room-temperature-IQ speculators who don't seem to comprehend that "a bubble" is not the same as "THE bubble" - bubbles happen in other markets all the time, but because those of us who aren't day traders don't hear about bubbles unless they destroy a market we assume the worst when we hear the term. It seems that what occurred recently was, in fact, a bubble but that doesn't necessarily mean it's THE bubble that everyone fears will kill the market.

People need to understand that bitcoin isn't really any different than any other commodity. Commodities have only the value we ascribe to them. We are trading so many post-scarcity products (music, movies, pornography) at such ludicrous markups daily that it occurs to me that it should be OBVIOUS that so much in this world has only the value we ascribe to things with no inherent value.

Bitcoin bubble theorists need to both learn some basic economics and perhaps the actual definition of the economic phrase "bubble": "trade in high volumes at prices that are considerably at variance with intrinsic values"

In other words, a bubble occurs any time people are regularly paying considerably more for something than it is worth intrinsically, such as gold which has some industrial value but not so much as to merit its current lofty prices. Trade of gold as a "store of value" has increased its value purely via speculation and so it too is a "bubble" at present. Realistically it's just another rock we pull out of the ground that has some special properties (chemically inert, electrically conductive, etc.) which make it better for some tasks than other rocks.

Is it submerged in mineral oil inside of a mini-fridge? That's phenomenal if you're talking temperature under load. The rig closest to the AC unit is still in the 60s for me. Then again I do live in Vegas and it did break 100F today

I think you mean 90C... 90F = 32C = The temp we all wish our cards would run at 24/7.

As for the lifespan, not entirely sure, I haven't killed a card yet (knock on wood) though I manage to keep mine comfortably in the 70s and 80s.

I use stock coolers on the cards themselves but as it happens I already had a portable AC unit hooked up to my living room window so I just blow cold air directly into the intakes. These can be had for under $300 and I'd consider them to be a good investment if you want to mine long-term without replacing a lot of cards.

Which is not to say that this is what happened, but the fact that some seem to think it could be makes me wonder if it's possible. If so, shouldn't we be coming up with some method of defending against it?

So with the current status of bitcoin being a relatively small market with only one real exchange having any reasonable levels of adoption, is it possible for someone with sufficient bankroll in both USD/BTC to sell low to themselves on separate account with sufficient volume (esp. on the weekend) to actually cause a major drop in price? You'd lose a bit of cash to people with already-existing lowball bids but if you knew that the cause of the depression was artificial, you could buy quite low and then hold until the market rebounded, perhaps to repeat the process again?

Is there any defense at present against such an attack? Do we need to be just as worried about those controlling substantial portions of the market volume as we are concerned with deepbit's potential 51% issue? If this works, wouldn't the opposite work too? Liquidate a large portion of your BTC to yourself at grossly inflated prices to drive market value up then sell to legitimate investors at the peak?

So I guess gold miners are just digging up what, then? Gold that people before them buried?

Oh and operating in 120F ambient temperatures, there's no possible way multi-card 5850 rigs wouldn't get so hot as to eat themselves (or at least trigger whatever heat event auto-shutdown measures are in place) so even if it got hot enough to cause heat stroke, it wouldn't stay that hot long enough to cause serious injury or brain damage; the heat sources would kill themselves and the temperature would drop.

Let's assume each machine had 2 cards. My dual 5830 rigs have similar power consumption to what he's claiming in the article and they run ~400W. 400 watts of consumed energy releases about 1400 BTU/h of heat each, times 4 machines is roughly 5600 BTU/h. For about $150 one can obtain a small portable air conditioning unit that can take about 7000 BTU/h of heat and move it outside through a vent that attaches to your window. To run one of these at a rate capable of removing 5600 BTU/h would require approximately 662 watts of electricity. Where I live (Vegas) that would cost about $54 per month.

In short: even IF this is true (which I highly doubt) our "victim" was sitting on about $2,560 worth of hardware that is costing him $130/month in electricity to run and because he was unwilling to spend $150 more on hardware and $54 more per month on electricity he purportedly has brain damage.

Now for why I believe exactly none of this...

In order to sustain heat stroke and brain damage you must reach a core temperature of approximately 105F. To reach such temperatures you have to either be under extreme duress, which you're probably not while sleeping, or exposed to ambient temperatures in excess of 120F.

Now I'm in a unique situation to talk about air temperature because I live in Vegas where my air conditioning was already struggling with the heat so I know exactly what four overclocked mining rigs do to the temperature in an un-airconditioned enclosed space.

Regardless of how low it was set, my air conditioner could barely maintain 76F in my bedroom. Adding four 2x5830 rigs to that room raised the ambient temperature to an uncomfortable 88F until I managed to get a portable AC unit to undo the 5,000+ BTU/h of heat I was adding to the room. I recognize that the 5850s noted in the story consume perhaps 50W more than my 5830s but even that can account for no more than another 200 BTU/h, a 28% increase - still nowhere near the heat necessary to create heat-stroke conditions inside a bedroom. Given that Vegas is not too far from Death Valley it's a reasonable guess that the air outside my door is at least as hot as, if not hotter than, wherever this person purportedly hails from.

Also, yes I believe that buttcoin is in fact a satire site.

I am so installing this when I get home.

As long as it's still paying the cost of electricity / air conditioning I'll see you there

Totally goes with what I was saying about scarcity per capita. If even 1% of the ~2.1 billion human beings with internet access were to jump on this bandwagon we'd be splitting the ~6.5 million existing btc another 20,950,060 ways. How much do you think the price would jump if the number of bitcoins divided by the number of users meant the average person had 0.31 BTC to their name?

And again, the sudden adoption would spike the number of miners which would spike the difficulty so it would increase proportionately with price

Or the people who are staying with it right now... Who by that time will probably be considered "big boys" so yeah