It's seems counter-intuitive but it makes sense when you think of it like this:

The less USD in the BTC market, the less USD that can be poured into alts. So both BTC and alts go down in price compared to USD.
To compound this effect, when there are bear markets, most investors will put their money into something perceived as more stable. So people will want to lock in the best BTC price they can find so that when BTC/USD recovers, their overall financial hit won't be as bad. Usually when there are bear markets, a lot of investors are significantly risk-adverse. The funny thing is that it also follows basic human psychology. When things are looking bad, most people want to find the thing that will be the least detrimental.

A lot of the time, this has the effect of stemming the bleeding in the BTC markets, at the cost of significant impact on alt markets.

It's without explanation in the sense that there doesn't seem to be a clear reason for this dip. But it looks like general market health. When over 75% of markets are declining, and all of the big markets are declining it's bound to create lots of downwards pressure. Unfortunately, NOBLE is not immune to this despite all of the good news surrounding it.

I think physical stores accepting BTC for goods is still in its infancy (with confirmations times, market price fluctuations and the sort). But the convenience provided by this shop as a gateway to using BTC is a wonderful thing. I can't wait to see how this expands and changes.

I'd personally love to support it if it was reasonably feasible for me. Too bad this can't work in the U.S. with the way things are...

The Chinese are all over the world, and they are doing all sorts of things.

Or the Chinese are in China, about to get ready for lunch.

Okay, now seriously, I think the various bans in China slowed down that market. But I also think there is a fairly large alt type of market in China. And let's face it, the vast majority of people in China have no incentive to use BTC as substantially as it could be.

I'll say 850. Initial spike to 750. Stabilization of other exchanges to reach a 5% average spread. Additional traffic will make the spread at 20%

So: 750*.95*1.2=855 but I like rounding so 850.

I cashed out 10 BTC in September so that I could make a down payment on a car I wanted. Doh!

If I only waited two months like I originally wanted. Meh, love...

4KWh, there are very few times where the power draw for this through one outlet will make sense.

It doesn't sound like you have much electrical experience; I wouldn't risk plugging 4 miners into one outlet if I were you.

This is really cool news. I wonder when this will expand.

Sometimes I relate Bitcoin ASIC companies to Lamborghini.

Ferruccio Lamborghini sold farming equipment even though in the 50's farming was very profitable. So using the wealth he got from selling farming equipment, he was able to start up Automobili Lamborghini.

A good amount of the time selling equipment makes more than the market that the product is being produced for.

I wish I found this post sooner...

*clap* *clap* *clap*

If there was a post of the day on bitcointalk, you sir would have gotten it for me this last week. Thank you.

As someone mentioned, there is a grey area when it comes to premines some of the time.

What I am surprised is that those who want to premine for the sake of development don't take the approach of embedding it into the block reward. Although there would likely be huge amounts of antagonism towards it, it's one of the more effectual ways of addressing the disparity of premined coins vs. coins currently in existence.

Let's say you want block rewards to be 100, and you want 1% for development purposes you could:

Make the first [insert # of blocks] reward 102 with 100 going to miners and the last 2 going to a wallet for devs.
Afterwards adjust to 101 with 100 going to miners and the last 1 going to devs (assuming that there will be continuous development).

If the premine is just for promotional purposes then just allow the first [insert # of blocks] have additional height and truncate after the promotional period is over.

I definitely believe a demographic study would show many interesting results. And to be honest, confirm many results already anticipated.

I do find it interesting how so many of these coins are being treated as businesses of some sort with marketing gimmicks, road maps, workflows, brand loyalty, infrastructure, and growth projections. As a matter of fact, I have begun calling coins in market terms.

In terms of securing the network and providing nodes, no. Miners do not consistently provide that service any more.

However, miners still provide "value" as they are spending "resources" (hardware/electricity) to obtain these little nifty digital bits.

I have seen a paradigm shift that clearly started with the whole FTC pump: once it was the inherent value of the protocol and network that brought value, now it's about the communities or pump mechanics that provide most of the value to a particular coin market. There are some coins that are using this shift to their own advantage by providing infrastructure that is appealing to the community, but many times it's all about a pump scheme.

Yes, a person experiences minute changes to his/her DNA throughout the course of life. Environmental mutagens, various forms of radiation, etc. Our bodies have mechanisms that do a very good job of preventing changes in our DNA, but just like the human experience, it too is imperfect.

Like any market, some manipulation is bound to occur. And this effect is more pronounced with the disparity with bots on trading platforms. The less organic nature of algorithmic trading causes things to seem like there is a constant stack on prices; this in turn makes it seem like there is a significant amount of manipulation (likely more than there really is).

I'm really excited that The Water Project drive was such a success! That was a really great job by the community!

It's also really awesome that they have allocated the funds to a project already!

This is truly wonderful news!!!

Don't get me wrong, I see the benefit. But for a person (or a group of people) with enough hash power the deliberate manipulation can cause some significant issues. I can see the uber-rich doing some seriously detrimental things for monetary gain. If the pool is large with a lot of small time people, they'll switch pools. But if the pool is made up of a few big time players, they won't care about switching when they can alter the price of their own coins.

This is what concerns me about coins that aren't reconciled with.

My apologies, I apparently skipped part of my train of thought. Say the colluding farm owners bought a bunch of the coins (that's why I say it was mined okay for a few weeks).

Price goes up. They dump. Buy up at the lows. Rinse and repeat. Since they can control the scarcity of the coin this enables them to act as wanton profiteers at their discretion.

To be honest, I wouldn't worry about electric costs (~$180 a day).

You need industrial infrastructure (or at least commercial) to support 50KWh. And setting this up and avoiding shorts and possibly worse is no easy task.