There was no speculative value then.  Would you spend 10,000 bitcoins when they're almost worthless if you had any suspicion that'd be worth (at least in a bubble) over a quarter of a million dollars a year later?

Come on.  Seriously. 

A:  Not every miner immediately rushes to sell every coin they get.
B:  Even if they did, in 14 hours Gox had over 22,000 btc change hands.  In that time only 4200 were mined (on average).

Imagine walking into a store that had 800 oranges for sale for $.20 each and shouting "Hey guys, I've got 200 fresh oranges here.  They're getting harder and harder for me to grow, so I want a buck each."

Now imagine after buying those $.20 oranges, everyone went home, traded 'em for something else (or hung onto 'em a while) and came back to resell 'em and they were still perfectly good as new.

The only time you're gonna get to choose the price for your oranges is when the rest of the market is gone.

I've gotta say...I tried TH when gox came back up but wasn't trading yet.

I'm quite finished with TH now.  Yuck.  They didn't mess with my data (so far as I know) but as a trading interface it's beyond weak.

Without a colossal rebuild, I don't see a lot of business moving permanently to TH.  Just my opinion as a small time miner/trader.  The level of skin I have in this game is pretty low.

If you buy 10K worth, you'll suddenly buy up every coin between you and some new price.  Most of the market will just watch the spread expand and think "....wtf?"

You'll get some sheep chasing you, but you probably won't start a buying frenzy unless you time it with some real or fabricated "news" that suddenly makes everyone want to buy at any price.

And if you don't do that, you've suddenly got 10K worth of coin that the market's not willing to pay more than 7K for.

Let me put it this way.

In the past 17.5 hours, there's been approximately (17.5 * 50 * 6)= 5250 new bitcoins produced.

The total number changing hands on the open markets (as represented by bitcoincharts) is less than half of that.

Therefore, at least for this 17.5 hour sample of time, difficulty hasn't mattered in the least.

Right.  It's quite the contrary - supply influences difficulty.  As supply changes (more or fewer miners) difficulty compensates.

The problem here is you're thinking of bitcoin mining as if it were a real world commodity market - as in, say, oil producers pump out oil and put it on the market where it's bought, used and is gone from the marketplace.  Such a market is one-sided.  Those who produce it set the price.  Occasionally commodities traders muddy the water, but by and large the producer determines the price.

That's not what happens here.  

It'd be more appropriate to think of what miners are producing as being like video game / subway / laundry tokens.  They have no value themselves.  Their worth is determined by what people are willing to accept them for, be it at bitmunchies, silkroad, whatever.  For the most part, any bitcoin merchant is basing their price in btc on what they think they can turn around and resell the btc for.  At any time, any token holder is free to resell their tokens.  The cost of producing the tokens is irrelevant...as is the ~ 400 btc per market being brought on the market every hour.  (Yes, ideally it's 300 but at least in recent months it's seemed like miners outpaced the difficulty, averaging 8-9 blocks per hour instead of 6 - if it actually averaged 6, the difficulty wouldn't move)

May not have been the intention behind bitcoin, but that's the way it works today.

There is nothing you can get for bitcoins that you can't get much easier in standard currency...except perhaps if you want the supposed anonymity of shopping at SR.  That is why btc has no value in and of itself.

It's absurd to think difficulty drives price.

The supply is increasing at a constant, known rate.  ~ 300 coins per hour average. 

The variable is demand. 


That's not shorting.

Shorting is a gambling that the price is going to fall - you sell shares you don't have at what you think is the "high" price, and you have a certain amount of time (based on terms you have with your trading house) in which to buy shares back to cover your short position.  If the price drops as you thought it would, you win.  If the price goes up, you take it in the shorts. 

What makes you think cash didn't get pulled just as fast as btc?

It's that hard to remember +7 during dst and +8 otherwise?

Yeah.  Don't forget it's P@55w0rd, not p@55w0rd.   

Yes, PST 7am would be 3pm GMT.

But you're not on PST, you're on PDT.  That means 8am.

Man this daylight savings stuff is dumb.  Don't they realize the effect on the planet / global warming from the extra hour of sunlight?!  (snicker)

Mine looks right, voted 'appear to have lost nothing'.


What did you expect?  Those coins you bought at $1 were effectively stolen goods.  If that happened in the real world, you'd be out the goods AND your money.  Every transaction from the time the dumping started should be eliminated - nothing you bought or sold after that point is "valid".

I too bought some before I knew it was a hack.  At the time I thought it was someone cashing out.  Those transactions are of course reversed.  Would've been nice, but...

A storm is brewing over Mt. Goxse

It's 7 pages...but since when is 1 day "ages"? 

(I made the same point on page 6) 

At this point in time, despite intentions to the otherwise, BTC is primarily a speculative cryptocommodity.  As such, difficulty will follow price, with a lag.  Not the other way around.  That lag may be months behind the price, not days or weeks.  I think the difficulty is just now catching up with the influx of miners that came around (including me) in the rise up through $10-15 BTCs.  We're nowhere near the difficulty we'd hit with a sustained $30. 

JMHO as a latecomer to the game who did his research and planning before jumping in.  I've known about BTC for a while, but didn't do anything with it until this year.  Didn't even sign up on the forum obviously until really recently.

I'm small potatoes.  I don't have the coins or dollars invested to move the market.

Hmmm.  My success notification was not in an email (had to click through), and neither the email nor the recovery site with confirmation identifies the account name. 

Sounds phishy to me.

"Mt. Gox will be open on time.  Trust me."

OK, you've read something into what I wrote that I didn't intend.  Let me rephrase.

Bitcoin wasn't hacked.   (period, full stop.)

(Unrelated to the fact that bitcoin wasn't hacked) Gox was hacked.  Supposedly.  (As you said, there is enough out there to make some wonder if it really was hacked).

Got it?  I never suggested btc was hacked.

Ahhh, OK, you were jumping back on the OP's topic.  I was merely partaking in a side discussion.  Heh.

??