No sales day for bitcoin

[aurora]

wonder, if everyone here would stop selling bitcoins for one day.

[chrcoe01]

probably not, it's like the stock market, when it's open people trade nonstop, but bitcoin markets don't have an off day

[aurora]

market closed on weekends. Why not do same for bitcoins market?
Idk  reason why market doesnt work on weekends. Maybe same can be done to bitcoins. Who knows maybe it will stabilize it.

[chrcoe01]

the issue is that bitcoins could still be traded outside of 'the market' (btc-e, mtgox etc) so those companies would miss out on the business done on those days I think.  Granted the out-of-market sales would be a lot less and more of a hassle if you are 'trading' as opposed to buying services/goods etc

[odolvlobo]

Preventing people from trading something does not stablilize its price. It creates an artificial inefficiency in the market that can reduce its stability. For example, if something happens over the weekend greatly affecting the value of a BTC, but the market is closed, all the trading that would have been done over the weekend would happen all at once on Monday morning.

In addition, preventing trading reduces the stability of the parts of the system that depend on the market. For example, if bitcoin currency trading was closed and somebody needed to sell bitcoins to save his business, that couldn't happen.

In general, more liquidity means more stability. In my view, the biggest threat to Bitcoin is the tremendous difficulty in buying and spending bitcoins -- in other words, its lack of liquidity.

[Silverbug]

Thats like asking for a whole economy to grind to a halt.

[Cm5xng]

I am guessing you must figure out a way to crash the market, like when stocks reach a point where the have a constant down flow in rates. Just like after the mtgox's major withdrawal bought the currency value to its knees. Trading was halted until the rate re-stabilized. Its human nature..

[Gabi]

I vote no, it's the free market, we trade whenever we want 

[Graet]

lol
it would be like asking all the miners to stop for a day - that would also stop exchanging of coins

I estimate a snowball would have more chance of surviving on the suns surface for 5 minutes than that ever happening or this idea

[underminer]

Yeah I think personal greed takes over.  If everyone agrees and quits mining, and one person continues, he is one lucky bastard the next day because he just got a lot of bitcoins in one day, lol.

As for transactions I bet with enough support you could have a bunch of people quit for a "green" day.  Or if you found out that satoshi was, in fact, hit by a bus you might get a day of reverence.  But not everybody!

[chorchonga]

What would be the point or incentive to ask people to comply with this?

[BobbyJo]

What would be the point or incentive to ask people to comply with this?

Agreed.  why would you want to stop trading?

[Kazimir]

There is no 'the' market. If one exchange decides to stop trading during weekends, people would simply trade on other exchanges.

And besides, 'weekend' is when, exactly? Bitcoin is a global currency. Your saturday morning might be my friday afternoon.

[underminer]

Oh I know!  Let's split some hairs instead of answering the question!  Sounds fun! 

Truth be told I'm not sure why either, other than some vague idea that this would stabilize the economy, I don't think this sort of thing would do that however.

[FbBitcoinLottery]

I vote no, it's the free market, we trade whenever we want 

agreed... Thats the idea behind bitcoins...

[Fjordbit]

Yeah I think personal greed takes over.  If everyone agrees and quits mining, and one person continues, he is one lucky bastard the next day because he just got a lot of bitcoins in one day, lol.

Actually, if all the miners quit mining, but one person continues, they would get approximately the same amount of bitcoins as they normally would have gotten. The difficulty doesn't change, so that miner would still have just as hard of a time solving a block as ever. If he were part of a pool, he likely wouldn't get any coins (but he would get shares).

[cloudytoday]

Yeah I think personal greed takes over.  If everyone agrees and quits mining, and one person continues, he is one lucky bastard the next day because he just got a lot of bitcoins in one day, lol.

Actually, if all the miners quit mining, but one person continues, they would get approximately the same amount of bitcoins as they normally would have gotten. The difficulty doesn't change, so that miner would still have just as hard of a time solving a block as ever. If he were part of a pool, he likely wouldn't get any coins (but he would get shares).

If everyone quits just before the difficulty change he would get bitcoins quicker. I think difficulty reductions are limited to 25% or something.

[RicRock]

market closed on weekends. Why not do same for bitcoins market?

The question isn't "Why not?"... it's "Why?"