Except we didn't have any "big" sell off, and it's very possible that's still waiting in the wings.

Since I sort of started this argument, let me clarify that I wasn't suggesting price as the *only* factor in difficulty. However, we will not sustain the current difficulty if the price drops to $0.50 like it was early this year -- we might eventually reach this difficulty again if the price were that low, but it would take much longer than what we saw with the bubble.

There's a fundamental flaw I think in supposing that difficulty dictates price. I'd take it the other way: price determines difficulty. If the price goes up to $5, then the difficulty can go up to around 2.5 million and still have miners make a small profit. If the price is $10, then difficulty should be at around 5 million. Right now the 1.1 million difficulty is low enough to support a price of around $2.20, but that difficulty actually came because of the price. We were up to almost 2 million on the difficulty when the bubble was in effect, and every time a new difficulty came out we had a substantial jump: http://btcserv.net/bitcoin/history/

Now that pricing has dropped to "sustainable levels", difficulty is backing down in response. The question thus remains what happens to pricing; if it starts another bubble, we'll see a bubble in difficulty as well as miners attempt to cash in.

June 27th.

Hey, it's called "speculation" for a reason. Maybe we should have a sub-subforum called "prognostications" though? LOL

It just looks like there's a big sell off around the middle of the month on a pretty regular basis. People are suggesting that the manipulator had all his fake ask walls bought up, but I'm not so sure. I'd say it's entirely possible that *a* manipulator (e.g. there's more than one) bought a bunch of BTC from some other manipulator, at around... what was it, $2.80, give or take? So if price climbs up to $3.15 with a sufficiently large number of buyers, they could cash out and make a nice little 10% profit off their move. Even more likely is that there was a lot of BTC purchased below $2.40 last month, so for those who purchased they could make close to a 50% increase.

Note that I'm not bearish or bullish really; it appears after the bubble and correction that we're going to hang out in the $2 to $3 range (or $2 to $3.50) for a while, waiting for the next big bubble. In the meantime, we'll bounce around in that range quite a bit, month to month. Or maybe not, but I'm not betting we're ready for a slow steady climb just yet. Guess we'll see how our bets play out in the next few weeks, and Dan can update his "wrong and right" thread. :-)

The calm before the storm hits next weekend... perhaps the weekend after that. I'm inclined to think that those holding and waiting for the price to increase are going to do their monthly cash out a little earlier than in November, just in time for the holiday break.

Bitcoinica has a larger spread when there's volatility, and the longer a price holds (and the larger the walls on the sides of it), the smaller the spread becomes. At least, that's what it looks like to me.

QFT, Qoheleth. My vote is obviously for laziness as the primary factor, but certainly stratification exists. How much of either one is to blame? I have a great idea: let's have the government spend billions of dollars researching this for us! They can just tax the top 1% more to pay for it.... ;-)

I've done bankruptcy, done divorce, been laid off from several jobs, and had plenty else go wrong. I'm still paying off student loans as well, but then if I hadn't been stupid about taking out more loans than I needed I wouldn't have nearly as much to pay back. Children of rich people are more likely to become rich (often just by inheriting it). Big freaking deal. How many people are we talking about that are truly wealthy, and how many of us are truly poor? I'm middle class, and according to the system probably bordering on being poor, but I don't feel poor and I'm sure as hell not going to ask the government for a handout. When I say I'm "doing okay", it's that I'm paying down debts, living within my means, and trying to make sure I act responsibly. Another five years and I should be debt free (other than a mortgage).

I'm currently paying over $400 per month to get insurance for my wife and child, with another child on the way, and since the passing of Obamacare our costs have gone up 35% in less than two years. Strange that something like government health care would cause prices on normal health insurance to go up, isn't it? Almost like we're being forced to turn to the government even more, but why would the people in power want us even more dependent than ever on them? Oh, wait: "In power." 'Nuf said.

The system is very broken right now, but not because we're avoiding taxing the rich. The system is broken because government is too big and is trying to control too many things. There are too many hands in the kitchen, and the food is coming out a disaster. We've got lawers passing laws that require lawyers to interpret the laws, and they're paid more than just about any profession. Once you get to be a judge, watch out: you get appointed and you have a life long position of power and influence, with no way to get voted out. I'd say more than anything we're becoming a society ruled by the courts. Beyond that we have politicians taking kickbacks and pretending to look out for the needs of the poor and downtrodden when what they're really doing is creating dependency.

I have no illusions that one party is better than the other here either, as both are horribly corrupt. Every time I vote for high ranking officials it's a matter of determining who will be less "evil". I'd fire the whole lot of them if I could, but then we'd just get replacements that are doing the same things. What's the solution? It sure as hell isn't Robin Hood, free health care and college for all, or Bitcoin. More likely than not the "solution" will be a complete collapse and failure of the system, years of chaos and perhaps even anarchy, and eventually we might get back to a better class of government. We're still better of than people were 100 years ago, but I think we've hit the peak in many areas and are in decline, so it's just a question of how far we'll fall before we stop giving away our rights and agency in the hope of more government programs to "protect" us.

I'm on the side of people trying to work hard and earn money through their efforts, and I'm doing my best to succeed in life. So far, things are going all right. If you want to handicap the 1% to give to the 99%, you're looking at a system doomed to fail. What happens when we take enough from the wealthy that there's no benefit to becoming wealthy? Then who do we tax next to support all the supplicants, beggars, and sycophants? Eventually, the path of taxing the wealthy and giving to the poor leads to failure.

I don't care if taxes are lower now than they were ten years ago; they're still too high. We should be cutting government programs. You want to complain about big business and a rigged system? Government is the biggest business around by a couple orders of magnitude. Our founding fathers would be disgusted, both by our leaders and by their supporters. America became great by allowing people to succeed and realize the American Dream. Today, we now have millions of people feeling entitled to the American Dream, and the only way they can see to get there is to tax those who have already accomplished this.

The game isn't "rigged", unless you mean wealthy people got there by looking at the system and using it to their advantage. And you know what? The system is still supporting them, because our leaders ARE the wealthy. You can raise taxes on paper all you want, but that won't actually take more money from the wealthy if they can just use loopholes or shift their money to another country.

Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat, and people need money to go buy a new hat. I foresee a lot of miners selling off what they can while they're still in the green (e.g. over electrical costs). It's what I'm doing at least, though with only 2GH/s I'm not exactly a major factor -- about 0.05% of the total Bitcoin network power I think? Anyway, my bet is we see an even lower low than what we've had in October and November, if only because of the desire to shop for gifts.

No. Any person that says phrases like "redistribute the wealth" deserves all the disrespect he gets. If you disagree, then why don't you give everyone on here your bitcoins? Or find some homeless person who has none to give them to. Occupy Wall Street tends to be just as bad with their hands held out. Why don't we just close all our corporations? That'll teach 'em, because it's not like the big companies can just move their operations to China and India, right? Oh, wait....

Thank goodness! The normal Internet is back. For a second there I thought it was broken.

One problem with the above ideal is that it assumes just because an FPGA might come out that can hash faster than a GPU at a lower power cost, people using those FPGAs will suddenly be profitable at $2/BTC. What will likely end up happening is that all the people heavily invested in GPU mining will start to switch to FPGAs, and then we'll have a lot more hashing power but the total amount of BTC generated per day will still stay at 7200 BTC. That would work out to $14400 per day available to split among all the miners, and there will be a race to get a bigger piece of the pie by mining faster, but no matter how many GH/s you can do you can't make more than $14400 per day.

I'd guess there are at least several hundred people trying to make money off of BTC mining--let's just call it 1000 for kicks. So each of those has the potential to make $14.40 per day if the price is $2 per BTC. Right now as one example, Deepbit.net has nearly 3000 GH/s of compute power, and that brings in about 2500 BTC per day. Like FlipPro I pay about $1 per day per 1GH/s, so the cost for 3000 GH/s at Deepbit is probably around $3000 per day. If we get FPGAs that can do $0.10 per day per GH/s, then we'll simply end up increasing compute power ten fold and we're still back to right where we are now (minus the people that drop out because they don't want to go with FPGAs -- like most CPU miners have quit outside of those that think playing the lottery is cost effective).

Really, to make FPGAs a practical solution, it needs to be cost effective in terms of buying, programming, and deploying the hardware. It looks like $400 to $500 for an FPGA board might be typical for 200MH/s, but power use will be 1/10 of a GPU doing equivalent work. The rest of the system running those FPGA miners will probalby use 40W minimum, and that might be able to push four FPGAs. So 800MH/s for 100W of power use seems reasonable, which is now only about five times as efficient as GPUs. What's more, you're looking at sinking $2000 into a system that would generate maybe 0.7 BTC per day at the current rate. Cost of power would be maybe $0.20 per day, for net income of $1.20 per day (per miner PC), but unless the FPGA boards are substantially cheaper you'd need 4.5 years just to cover the cost of the hardware investment. So a better target would be FPGAs that cost less than $50 that can do 200MH/s, and that's not looking likely.

What will make BTC mining with FPGAs profitable? That's right: higher prices of BTC. Just like with GPUs. When you need to expect your income from mining to decrease over time (i.e. the difficulty will increase if mining is profitable, so your BTC per day goes down), the only way investing in hardware makes sense to me is if you can pay off the hardware within six months. Otherwise you're sailing a sinking ship.

I just don't see us ever hitting the double digits in the near term; it will be a slow climb to that point. Right now there are a lot of people with coins from mining that are only selling what they need to cover their power costs, which means around $2 per BTC is break-even. If the price hits $5, they're going to think, "better to sell now and make a healthy profit than to hold longer and end up back at $2." It will take something really big to overcome that IMO. But hey, what do I know? I know mine about 2BTC per day, so maybe the big miners are doing far better and are more bullish in their outlook?

I think they're still debugging or at least tweaking; a pending order didn't show up for me a minute ago but it does now. I also have to wonder if any of the "rally" of the past day or so came because of the MtGox timer -- people expecting something bigger than a UI overhaul maybe? I hope not, but you never know.

Would love to see us hit that $2.60 wall today -- that would make this ride even better! Amazing how quickly the bids built up over the past two days for >$2.60.

I suppose if you expect the price to keep going up, liquidating at a loss might make sense. Me, I'm currently down 4% but I expect some time in the next month I'll be able to buy back in at a profit. The only way I would get force liquidated for a loss is if prices go above $6, and at that point my mining income would more than make up for the loss, even if difficulty were to double.

Yeah, no kidding. My short sell at 2.75 is looking pretty silly right now, but I can wait. The real question is where to put the limit sell in -- $3.25? I don't see us sustaining anything near the $3.00+ mark right now, though my mining rigs would love me to be wrong.