Just so you guys know, altcoins isn't the reason for bitcoins price dropping

[s1gs3gv]

Actually what you just mentioned is velocity. If lots of transactions happen fast a small amount of market cap can come around and go around very fast, enabling lots of transactions.

Sure, but who wants to stand in the checkout line waiting for 10 minutes while your payment is confirmed ?


Use of malicious negative trust to suppress free speech brings discredit to the bitcoin community

[markm]

Actually what you just mentioned is velocity. If lots of transactions happen fast a small amount of market cap can come around and go around very fast, enabling lots of transactions.

Sure, but who wants to stand in the checkout line waiting for 10 minutes while your payment is confirmed ?

Right. For that you'd maybe prefer GeistGeld, which you get alongside your bitcoins, namecoins, groupcoins, devcoins, ixcoins, i0coins and coiledcoins when mining.

Or more likely you'd use a payment processor, a bitcoin denominated banking account debit or credit card or somesuch tool.

But again you are back to harping on velocity. Paper wallets in safe deposit boxes are low velocity.

-MarkM-

[s1gs3gv]

But again you are back to harping on velocity. Paper wallets in safe deposit boxes are low velocity.

I'm not harping about anything. I am asserting that "There is no reason for bitcoin to be worth more than the cost of mining it other than speculative hope that it will be"

looks like BTC is doing a retest of ~400 today … Past performance is no guarantee of future results.

The use of malicious negative trust to suppress free speech brings discredit to the bitcoin community

[markm]

Not only speculative hope but also deliberate backing of more and more bitcoins at higher and higher prices by folk who need to keep it at a high market cap in order for it to serve their needs.

It takes time, but market-makers / liquidity providers can over time build up larger and larger piles of buy offers, eventually large enough to buy all the coins if all the coins ever got offered at prices the pile of buy orders had piled up to.

Eventually the profits made just in such market-making can add up to more that the entire market cap of bitcoin had been in the past.

The same applies to any coin, of course, although the more of it miners are mining and dumping the harder it will tend to be for market makers to pile up enough by orders fast enough in the course of providing liquidity on both sides of the order-book.

Just on Vircurex alone we had been starting to make good progress toward increasing DeVCoin's bottoming-out price before Vircurex decided to freeze all the bitcoins we had been accumulating on the buy side of the DVC/BTC order-book.

And that was after only a few years of using VIrcurex, most of that time being before we had figured out that most recipients of DeVCoins preferred to dump it in market orders lowering the price to placing sell orders and waiting for buyers to take them up on the sell offers. Once we realised most recipients of coins dump them we ramped up our efforts to buy as many as they dumped and be prepared to buy even more.

-MarkM-

[s1gs3gv]

Not only speculative hope but also deliberate backing of more and more bitcoins at higher and higher prices by folk who need to keep it at a high market cap in order for it to serve their needs.

It takes time, but market-makers / liquidity providers can over time build up larger and larger piles of buy offers, eventually large enough to buy all the coins if all the coins ever got offered at prices the pile of buy orders had piled up to.
-MarkM-

Yes, good point. Its obvious to me that 'market makers' are keeping a lot of these markets from falling faster and further. And i'm sure there is good money to be made this way for the skilled, but at the end of the day you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear.

Use of malicious negative trust to suppress free speech discredits the bitcoin community