^^^ I was thinking the exact same thing.  Wouldn't even need to be a new coin. Just if there was more software for stores to instantaneously calculate the rate of USD / BTC.

I would think Litecoin would be better for this because of its speed bonus. Where bitcoin could be used more for only larger purchases, and for holding.

I also think exchanges should have time delays before orders are processed. Like a set delay of 5 / 10 minutes that must pass before your order goes in.

Supporting the volume of trades that currency speculators work at , just by the second, is a MASSIVE amount of infrastructure.

It's impossible to know for sure. But what if last night there was no trading lag at all at mtgox wasn't overloaded. I think it is at least feasible that the price would have moved slower, which would have caused less panic selling, which in turn would have prevented this rapid collapse in USD value.

I think 'the man' could have done this, and could in the future do this sort of thing, but that it wasn't the case here.

Really it was just classic bubble. It followed the classic bubble graph almost exactly.

Thing is: Bitcoin does have incredible use and value and is an amazing new currency. This over-correction seems almost reasonable to me. It was getting a lot of media attention. Something -- anything-- just can not sustain that rate growth (ok well maybe besides the U.S debt perhaps).

I think the community learned how bad it was to have one exchange dominating the market. With all the decentralized appeal of bitcoin it doesn't help to have so few exchanges...

Bubble for the modern time: the last week has been an incredible rollacoaster. And I don't even have any guess what prices will be like tomorrow. I could believe anything from $1 - $250 .

Getting into mining in late 2010 or so.........for a few days.

What a dumb move in hindsight. Generally leave my PC on all the time,  and had also had a GTX 280 at the time. If I just hit the damn 'start' button before I went to bed at night, could have made a pretty bitcoin.

[/quote]

7950's turned up yesterday. Took me 60 minutes to pull my PSU out and plug the cards up and replace my fans.

This morning I loaded up guiminer and joined a pool. My client is reporting 1500mhash and Slushpool is telling me I'm doing 1600.

And that is with a -s wait enabled, as I didn't want to leave them running at 100% whilst I was away at work, so they are ticking around 90%.

I don't intend of spending hours and hours tinkering, ever.

Oh and I've made 0.03btc already
[/quote]

Well you either got lucky, or I got unlucky   Good on you...

For myself had a heck of a time getting everything going somewhat optimally. About a 30/30/30 split between the hardware, rebuilding some systems out of spare parts, installing new OS's etc, and then after that, figuring out some cgminer problems and power problems (burnt out 2 old psu's in a week!) then had a hell of a time finding a reasonable pool. Wasted tons of potential earnings on pools with 30% stale rates until finally finding a reasonable pool with 4% stale. No joke was 6 or 7 pool I tried.

Anyways did enjoy myself though and did most of this with a beer in hand

I think the price should be around $80-120  and a correction was needed...

Still thrilled about my ASIC investment in Avalon [batch 3]... But I'm more concerned about the mining side of things now myself, for my home hobby mining units. The fiat return price has dropped, fair enough. But difficulty has increased massively in the last month. I wonder if I'll even be able to break even mining if the difficulty doesn't follow the USD/BTC price crash [for my home rigs].

Great points...good to keep a clear head.. .

I think it is a good idea to close the market for the time being. Hopefully for the last time.

A even better one, IMHO, for would be for MTGOX to actually SLOW down trades.

They should have it so you put in trades and there is an enforced, 5 minute delay before the trade sets. BTC is not USD,  so I don't see why they can't think out of the box and come up with an equally novel approach to their problems.

They did not have the [massive] infrastructure required to support the very, very high volume and bandwidth requirements that currency speculators operate at. By accumulating lag and falling behind processing trades they made the crash even worse I think.

I couldn't find too many metrics regarding scrypt performance.

It's an interesting challenge. I'm putting together a 4 ghz i5 miner with 16gb at least 1600MHz tied to two 7950's. It'll be interesting to see what rates I get. From most of the reports I've read it's from people switching weak-cpu GPU miner systems to scrypt, so I'm really interested to see what some serious memory bandwidth will do for me.

It almost doesn't matter that much anymore in the big picture, I think.

Whether:
a) BFL was a complete scam from the get go
b) BFL is a honest company who just had anticipated troubles getting their product done

The investors (i.e pre-order folks) lost a massive amount of fiat currency investing in this thing. Even it they finally ship in say August, the difficulty is going to be so high that the product will likely not be that attractive anymore compared to new ASIC products that will be developed.

One thing is for certain, BFL made a fortune and the preorder makers gots screwed. No matter what happens beyond today. Even they shipped this week it was still a big disaster.

But they won't be shipping. They don't even have a complete prototype. And they said months and months ago that they would be 'shipping soon'. 

Conversely, if you are a professional IT / hardware nerd, and you are some sort of freak who really enjoys tinkering for hours with software and hardware to improve performance, then mining is a fantastic hobby.

If the thought of spending hours and hours of constantly tinkering and improving and setting up mining computers does not appeal to you, you'll probably really regret get into this .

Signed.

I'm a LTC miner so would like to see the value go up, but MTGOX just can't handle the loads right now. They need more infrastructure. The volume at which the alt coins will be traded at is pretty intense. I don't see how they could effectively handle this load increase at all considering the current delays with BTC.

Lol.

Got to watch out for 'the Jews'.

Yup I see a whole bunch right outside my window. They are wearing uniforms and kicking in the doors. Buckle down..!

Hey is that Larry David!

edit: just to be clear trying to be a very sarcastic dumb ass and think this thread is pretty stupid.

The ease at which the big few currency exchanges get overwhelmed is a bit of problem. Hopefully this will work out soon.  They don't have the network infrastructure to be able to handle the rapid volume that currency exchange dudes work at. 

I'm happy to see a temp drop though personally. Hopefully it will follow with mining difficulty.... any bit helps...

As a new hobbyist miner guy I can't believe how fast difficulty has gone up...

Started mining mostly LTC in late March, difficulty was 78ish... and it's looking it'll go to 285 in two days.   From 78 -=> 280 in about two weeks.. ! Pretty insane. Glad I'm just really enjoying it as a hobby and didn't drop too much into hardware..

Currency speculators have been known to be harmful to currency markets

Not that I have anything morally against them...fair enough for them... but in the bigger picture another big exchange is desperately needed. If there were 2 x mtgox things would be in much better shape.

Any predictions for tomorrow? I'd say back around $220?

I hope bitcoin doesn't continue it's meteoric rise.  I hope it stabilizes a bit while the infrastructure and support for the currency grows. .. And then slowly raises for a long time

Sky-rockets lead to crash landings a lot of the time.  But it is true that Bitcoin is a different breed of beast altogether, making predictions even more hard than it is for the usual kind of stocks and goods that can be bought.  Bitcoin is an entirely new kind of resource that still has to grow stronger roots in our bloated world corpse of an economic cluster**** before it will be able to weather all the storms coming.

What you guys talking about?  BFL shipped last week!

/heavy sarcasm

Ok thanks.

Sorry to anyone if I seem hasty to judge Novacoin negatively.

After reading up on last night I didn't find much info, read some claims of some sort of shady stuff going on, and all the pools seemed offline, so that's how my opinion formed. Certainly be great if an official website & wiki were set up.

I didn't realize it was such a new coin at all either.

Really there isn't a whole lot of information to be found on Novacoin.

Here's some info:
https://github.com/CryptoManiac/novacoin/wiki/FAQ

It has no hard cap limit has a 2billion limit.  But this isn't a big factor because I don't think many people expect it to last anywhere near that long.

I think they should rename it Specul-coin myself    

But you never know. Maybe it'll stick around who knows.

Ok thanks. I'll give that a go maybe for a few days.

For a coin with such a poor rep it has a surprising amount of value.