Your major mistake here was not recognizing that the miners are the original suppliers and the primary issue they fight with daily is the difficulty rating. To this end, difficulty determines the psychology of the individual producer - while it certainly doesn't change the number of total coins available, it changes the number of coins available to each individual seller and therefore the resource becomes scarcer to them and so they demand more money. Resource scarcity is at the heart of supply and demand and it is not absolute - the scarcity of a resource is not simply a matter of "how many of thing X exist" but also "how many people must share the resource pool of X" - as more people must share the pool, the scarcity per capita increases and as so the value does as well.

Scarcity per capita, market depth, production cost and rate, investor demand, end-user demand and much more go into the price of a bitcoin. I'm saying that everyone who is taking some tiny corner that they perceive to be the "supply and demand" at the heart of bitcoin is wrong. There are many factors affecting supply and many factors affecting demand and they are interwoven in a complex and tangled hierarchy. The hierarchy as a whole tends to follow certain rules, such as "price is proportional to difficulty" because the factors built into the network conspire to make it so: more participants means more scarcity per capita and it also means more miners; value rises with difficulty. Neither is the cause of the effect witnessed in the other. They are both caused in this case by a simple increase in the market size without a corresponding increase in resource availability. In some examples one causes the other, in other example neither is the cause but are actually effects of some tertiary cause.

You are all over-simplifying things. If economics were this simple we'd all have to be quite stupid not to have been billionaires long before bitcoin existed.

Just a market correction, nothing to see here, move along people.

P.S. my actual answer is no, but not for the reasons listed. I don't have enough wattage left in my tiny apartment to power any more rigs and still turn on the TV without popping a breaker 

Look, I'm not saying you're all wrong, I'm saying each of you is right about part of the system. I'm all for Occam's Razor and everything, but neither simple answer correctly describes the system as a whole. Like most economic systems, bitcoin represents a tangled hierarchy of competing and interrelated interests. In this respect, the only difference between bitcoin and any other economic system is that bitcoin is still small enough that we can see most of the bits that make up that hierarchy. Within such a small hierarchy we can spot trends and make predictions somewhat more easily. The primary contention in bitcoin right now is between the miners and the investors. Some see the fact that price and difficulty correspond and say that they are causally linked. They then infer that in most systems one thing is always the cause and one is always the effect. In a tangled hierarchy you will often find various types of closed loops in which the outcome of one action, modulated by other factors becomes the input to the original action and thereby becomes its own cause.

I'm not saying anyone is right or wrong, I'm saying you're all right and wrong at the same time because you're all describing aspects of the same reality without really painting the entire picture.

They follow each other, the system is self-referential.

So your opposing theory is what, that price moves down when a slew of miners mysteriously stop operations for no apparent reason when the market is at an all-time high? Investors create fluctuations above a baseline determined by the producers of a resource, how is this so hard to believe?

Indeed. $30 was actually high for the current difficulty so I'm not surprised at all to see it settle back to $25-ish numbers. The only way the price goes up disproportionate to the difficulty is in the event of large-scale adoption. If an entire country, for example, decided to use BTC as their national currency we'd have to split the ~6.5 million existing bitcoins between a huge number of people. If the average bank account balance in Country X is 0.02 BTC then obviously the things that 1 BTC would buy there would be immensely valuable, hence driving the cost.

Since I didn't hear news about a country switching to crypto-currency I happily sold at 31 BTC and bought back in at 25 

Again, this is only half of the equation. Changes in difficulty lag changes in price during times of increased value because the higher price motivates more people to become miners, thus increasing the number of hashes per second computed by the network as a whole.

To see the other half of the equation, look at the times when it appeared that BTC's value was going to tank, note the point at which the market value refused to go any lower. Plot these low points over time and they also correspond to difficulty, in a much tighter curve than the highs or averages do, actually. This is the low point beyond which the miners are hesitant to sell. This is because unlike investors, most miners have ongoing costs to cover and a profit to make for this to be worth their time/effort. I know my electric bill is certainly high enough that I'd be hesitant to sell below a certain point...

Difficulty follows total hashrate which could be slightly influenced by price, since a higher $/BTC exchange rate makes mining appear more profitable, but price also follows mining in that miners are the initial supply. Once all of the investors have burned off their shares, the miners tend to hold steady with what they deem is a reasonable price for their efforts and so represent a "floor" to the market, which historically has increased proportional to difficulty.

Really, the market is a sort of "strange loop" (as described by Dr. Douglas Hofstadter). Like many things in this world its initial conditions emerged from outside influence and over time the factors which influenced it came to be included within it. The market influences the miners who then influence the market which influences the miners... It's like a big crypto-economic M.C. Escher painting

It has been addressed, many times before.

But I'm a nice guy, so instead of "lawl l2google nub" I'm going to reply like a non-sociopath:

Play with your flags. -v -w128 agression=11 works nicely for me, you might get better or worse with different values of w (must be powers of 2, w64, w128, w256 are valid, w100 is not)
Over/under clock your GPU. Get MSI Afterburner, bump core up to something like 975, bump memory down... as low as it'll go without crashing really.

So I can of course monitor system temps with speedfan and gpu temps with afterburner, but I'd like to consolidate my temperature monitoring across all of my rigs somehow. Does anyone know of an existing utility that can do this, or perhaps even a windows command-line utility to return GPU temp that I could base a hacked-together utility on?

I did mention it of course, but as they're looking for automation and TradeHill's API isn't ready/published yet...

Nope, my math was right. I predicted rig #4 would be OK when idle and pop the breaker under load and sure enough

Guess I'll be going to Home Depot to pick up another portable AC unit this weekend. If my apartment management wasn't willing to believe my AC was inadequate before they'll certainly cry foul with 5200 BTUs worth of computer heat being pumped into the air 

Apologies for the necromancy but I just got another reply from InTrade:


I of course chatted with him about Mt. Gox and its associated trade API.

Just thought I'd keep you all up to date 

*Does his best Admiral Ackbar impression*

IT'S A TRAP!!!

I'm thinking of starting a web site or two selling goods for BTC and since I'm starting from scratch rather than expanding on an existing site I thought I'd ask the community before I start: What is, currently, the most polished/developed shopping cart that supports BTC. I'm talking about ease of use, ease of setup. I don't want my customers to have to jump through any more hoops than necessary but I'd also like to jump through as few as possible myself.

This is a very good point that I hadn't considered. I'd imagine it would be the equivalent to how some CEOs take all or part of their salary as stock which they can then liquidate for cash. Never occurred to me whether that kind of liquidation would qualify as capital gains tax, income tax or some third kind of tax that I'm not aware of... I await a response!

Exactly. The bigger a distributed network becomes, the deeper it permeates society, the harder it is to kill.

It also occurs to me that my math might be off or my understanding of standard house wiring could be off. Does anyone with a mid-to-large scale mining operation have any comments about how you addressed this particular "problem of scale"? How many rigs can I actually run on a single circuit at 400W each? Is it at all possible (likely) that two outlets in one room could actually be on different circuits?

Aside from the USB stick idea, which I might just do this weekend, I've already done all of the above. I guess I'm just going to have to spread the rest of my (unbuilt) rigs around the house to avoid popping breakers. I didn't want to do this because I've got a portable AC unit already that will keep that one room cool, even with five or six rigs dumping 1300 BTU/H each into the air, now I'm going to have to spend more money and power cooling them all, or just have one very uncomfortably hot room.

Thank you very much, repointing now