Those GPUs are already flooding eBay and the prices are depressed but holding up because the GPU market is larger than the scrypt mining market. I just sold one for a ~33% loss over December pricing, disappointing but still profitable with mining factored in.

If those were unprofitable ASICs that had to be scraped, then I would have lost money.

Is anyone else having difficultly with gridseed devices dropping hashrate on wafflepool periodically?

I have a few gridseeds that hash stably, however on "faster coins" the hashrate reported by wafflepool drops ~80-90%. During this time there are very few stale shares or rejects and cgminer shows hashing as operating fine, and the connection to the pool is fine. Instead the number of accepted shares suddenly drops to lower number compared to what I'd expect for the hashrate. Then when wafflepool switches to a slower coin, all of a sudden the hashrate jumps back up to what it should be.

I am wondering if the gridseed devices are losing work by being interrupted with new work before finishing a previous batch on these fast coins. Or maybe something else? If so any solutions?

Has anyone else seen this behavior before? I like mining on wafflepool, but recently about 50% of the time my hashrate is crashing...

Here is an example, these are my shares for the past 10 shifts. Under normal operation I find ~30,000 shares per shift, but on some shifts accepted shares drop to 3,000-8,000 per shift, which is a large drop. During this time wafflepool will report a lower estimated hashrate, but cgminer says everything is fine. Then there is a coin shift and all of a sudden my accepted shares jump back up and wafflepool estimates my full hashrate again.

Shares (yours / total)   Blocks Found
29,184 / 202615296   4
33,792 / 200934912   1
17,408 / 201347072   7
3,584 / 201063424   3
7,168 / 201006080   2
10,752 / 201811456   8
6,656 / 200230400   5
8,704 / 201930240   12
5,120 / 201117696   5

The advantage with GPUs is you can always sell (or use) them later. My home system just got a free R9 290 upgrade since I've shutdown a small scrypt farm.

The issue is dedicated H/W. For example I have a single BFL FPGA single sitting around waiting to go in the trash. There is nothing else to do with it.

ASIC H/W that is power efficient will at least last several years where you can run it at around break even. However ASIC H/W that is not power efficient only has a short lifetime since better H/W makes it unprofitable to even turn on.

This is why buying early ASICs was always a losing option, you are buying something that is guaranteed to have a short lifetime and long ROI...

+1 A lot of what you say is very true.

This is why it is important to only invest what you are willing to lose and very importantly not depend on selling bitcoin to maintain your livelihood. If you rely on bitcoin monthly sales for food/rent or have so much invested that you "can't lose", then the large players will definitely eat you alive.

But if you only invest what you can walk away from, and don't need to sell BTC for any reason, then any attack by the big players is meaningless. You can just sit back and wait and wait and wait. And if the price goes stupid low, buy more. That's how to win the game.

Yes, I completely agree with you.

What really matters is M3 supply. It was the rapid M3 growth we had prior to the meltdown that caused price inflation.

What we are seeing today is M0 supply simply "catching up" to prior M3 credit growth. Essentially as everyone leveraged themselves the M3 to M0 ratio was stretched too thin, and there are only two solutions:

1) The market is forced to reduce leverage back normal levels through defaults. This brings prices back down to what they were before the unsustainable credit growth started. This has the effect of punishing those who took bad risks and also rewards those who were prudent and saved.

2) The government reduces leverage back to normal levels by printing M0 to bring it back in line with elevated M3. This causes prices to stay where they are while the real economy reduces. This has the effect of punishing those who were prudent and saved while rewarding those who took bad risks.

This is why printing M0 is bad. It is not that inflation will happen (because it already has). Printing M0 to "fix" things is bad because it rewards the wrong behavior while punishing the right behavior.

Bitcoin enables vendors to offer the same "cash discounts" as done with cash transactions. The two gas stations closest to me offer a "credit" price and a "cash" price. The cash price is cheaper. If more people use bitcoin, we will see vendors do the same and offer discounted prices in BTC.

The thing to remember is the wording is all marketing spin. These gas stations are not offering a "cash discount", they are really charging a "credit surcharge". But people don't like to pay extra surcharges, so marketing just calls the real price a discount.

This reminds me of what happened when coke tried to enable vending machines to charge different prices depending on the temperature. What they really tried to do was raise the price on hot days and charge more, but that turned people off. So instead the vending machines were programmed to say the new higher price was the real price and on colder days you received a discount (back to the regular price).

People like discounts, they hate surcharges. The key for bitcoin is to expose how everything else prices in a surcharge, but bitcoin offers a discount.

I have the buy part down fine and pick them well. My problem is I never remember the SELL part and am too greedy to part with coins in the bubbles. One day I'll learn I guess.

That chart is already out of date.

M0 money supply is $3.8T now and rising faster every day. The fact that M0 is doubling every few years inevitably means that BTC will go up in dollar terms. Remember M0 was ~$0.7T in 2008...

When we are back to $100 range, and everyone who made these predictions is throwing in the towel, that is when I plan to back up the truck.

IMHO I think we might still be a ways off from max pain. In 2011 we looked at a 95% drop which was essentially a complete wipeout. That would take us to $60 on this cycle.

If we hit sub-$100 again I'm pretty sure the negativity will be absolute. That is my buy more target. The bitcoin I do have I am unwilling to sell though since you never know when the trend will reverse.

I just logged in and was given a buy quote of $483.

It never makes sense for coinbase to "reach a limit for the day" or "run out of coins". All they have to do is raise or lower their buy/sell prices to match the demand they are seeing. This can be different from the exchanges.

This topic has come up many times before.

I believe ECDSA is considered weak against a full blown quantum computer (which is still a ways away) but that other algorithms that are believed to be quantum resistant are already developed. Bitcoin would need a hard fork and switch.

SHA256 hashing should still be fine. A quantum computer can not beat SHA256 but would exponentially increase the difficulty. So ASICs would become paper weights and the quantum computer owners billionaires. Personally I find this to be acceptable, the scientists who finally get a working quantum computer deserve some rewards.

From the article:

"One of the people familiar with the latest directive said that the central bank does not intend to ban bitcoin trading in China, and said the move is to "enforce what was already said in the December document." That document had said bitcoin is not a currency with "real meaning" and does not have the same legal status as a currency, but that the public is free to buy and sell bitcoin online provided that they accept the risk."

Bitcoin is not banned in China. China is now enforcing rules they put in place that say banks and similar institutions can not offer bitcoin accounts or transact in bitcoin.

The same rules apply for gold. Chinese banks can not open 'gold' accounts in the same manner as yen. Gold is a commodity and operates through that infrastructure. China is doing the same for bitcoin.

If you think bitcoin is "banned" in China, then you also would have to believe that gold is banned in China, which is absurd...

Edit: Impulse beat me to the exact same quote. That's two people that saw this right away, wonder why the OP didn't

No one knows.

Instead of trying to get lucky and find the bottom, just put in a buy ladder buying more and more at regular price drops. Then where ever the bottom ends up, you'll have bought around there.

If you're a trader who's holding, yep you've lost a ton of money.

If you're a long term believer in bitcoin, the best thing to do is go into cold storage and just walk away for a while. There are better things to do with your life than watch short term fluctuations (I take the same approach to stocks, some of my best positions are ones I haven't touched in a few years and look at maybe once every few months.)

Stop going back up, I want cheaper coins.

Is 0.5 BTC and 0.5 oz. gold an option?

Because I'd prefer to take a little from column A and a little from column B.

While I doubt this is true and/or fully accurate, if major country's start to ban bitcoin for real then that means bitcoin is succeeding.

No one said taking the bankers down would be easy folks.

If you mine a coin at $1200 then you have $1200 in income on that day, minus any expenses used to produce that income (electricity, equipment cost depreciation, etc). The "bias" for you coin is now $1200.

Then if the price drops to $600 or goes to $10K nothing happens until you sell.

If on the day you sell the price of BTC is $600, then you would have a $600 loss ($600 - $1200 =  $-600).

If on the day you sell the price of BTC is $10K then you would have a $8800 gain ($10000 - $1200 = $8800).

To figure short or long term capital gains you just use the length of time you held the coin after mining it. If you sell it less than 1 year after mining it you pay short term capital gains, if you sell after holding for more than 1 year you pay long term.

I lived overseas for several years, and this is very clearly wrong.

If you are a US citizen (dual or otherwise) you owe taxes on all worldwide income, even if you do not enter the US for years.

There is a "foreign earned income exclusion" which you only qualify for if you are in the US for 30 days or less per calendar year. With the foreign exclusion you can receive a deduction of up to $97K (in 2013) on income earned outside of the US. This only applies to income earned outside the US.

Many US citizens who live outside the US earn less than the foreign exclusion and so believe they don't need to file US taxes or owe taxes, but this is incorrect. You still have to file a return each and every year to receive the foreign exclusion. If you do not the IRS can later stay you owe taxes and have lost the foreign exclusion deduction.

The dual citizens you know who earn less than $97K/year are correct that they don't owe US taxes, but they still have to file and pay taxes on amounts over that.