[XPM] Why Primecoin Price Has Bottomed Out

[eCoinomist]

Original article here:
http://ecoinomist.com/xpm-primecoin-price-bottomed

Ever since Primecoin has been on exchange, we have seen quite a radical price swing from as low as 0.0019 to as high as 0.019 (x10 times fluctuation) just within the space of one week.

This is by the far the most profitable altcoin to date for speculators to trade with the typical price swing of 10-20% per day if sold/bought in the right time, with huge initial volume of trading that no other crypto has matched for such an early release stage.

So why has the price hit the floor recently?

Some possible explanations:

A)
While it's not profitable to mine with VPS, such as DigitalOcean or Amazon EC2 any more, the early miners like myself, who mined XPM in the first few weeks were able to mine at a profit even at the current exchange rate of 0.0061, mainly because the difficulty back then was way lower than now. But just like many miners, I saw a very rapid price increase x10 times just within the space of one week, thus suspected XPM might be on big exchanges like BTC-e soon. So I held on and did not sell much.

Now many VPS miners end up with a stash of XPM that they have paid hard cold real world cash for, which for some, due to economical reasons, they might have to sell some in order to recoup back the initial investment.

These are the kind of reluctant sellers, who would only sell just enough to cover his/her overhead -> thus we observe low volume of Primecoin trading lately.
The major Primecoin exchange mcxNow has hit the lowest XPM trading volume ever at ~170 BTC per day.

B)
The only people remain mining XPM right now are the botnets (zero overhead) and VPN operators who have access to server computers at much cheaper prices.
For botnets, obviously the is no need for price consideration when it comes to selling - they make profit at any rate.
This might well be what the current reality is, if we look at the infrequent trading volume that tends to spike out of nowhere:

Whereas in the peak period the trading volume was spread quite evenly between all hours of the day.

In Conclusion

The current Primecoin market is dominated by a few big XPM holders and speculative buyers.
But we shall see some changes very soon, when a working GPU miner comes out, which will certainly even out the playing field for everyone.

Dus tot he difficulty machenics of Primecoins, higher mining power means higher difficulty, which results in fewer XPM rewards per block. And because Primecoin has dynamic difficulty adjustment that changes on a per block basis, it means Primecoin will become a lot more scarce then it is now.

The question is...

How well will Primecoin be received by the GPU community?
Based on this thread, the interest seems to be astronomical.

Also, considering that fact that Litecoin has become increasingly hard to mine, and all the other altcoins really have no true innovation or future, besides pure hype and speculation, Primecoin is the only one at the moment to fill that gap for large and small GPU rig owners.

[claycoins]

like anything - supply-demand.  you need to bring new people into the market or make the existing buyers want more.

[eCoinomist]

like anything - supply-demand.  you need to bring new people into the market or make the existing buyers want more.

I can definitely see the inevitable movement of GPU number crunching power shifting from Litecoin to Primecoin market as soon the a GPU miner becomes available publically. It's just a natural order of economical distribution. Litecoin rose int he midst of Bitcoin's GPU mining fall, and so will Primecoin do to Litecoin. The only thing we've yet to witness is an Asic Scrypt miner to make that transition complete.

And since there will be many more people involved when GPU mining is possible, the demand will naturally rise due to more people involved with the coin. Just like Bitcoin, its price is only as high the people holding are willing to sell at.

Prices can be crushed down by a few hoarders and dumpers, but to rise consistently, it needs adoption rate in quantity, and that's what will happen when GPU mining comes out.

[Jaxkr]

like anything - supply-demand.  you need to bring new people into the market or make the existing buyers want more.

I can definitely see the inevitable movement of GPU number crunching power shifting from Litecoin to Primecoin market as soon the a GPU miner becomes available publically. It's just a natural order of economical distribution. Litecoin rose int he midst of Bitcoin's GPU mining fall, and so will Primecoin do to Litecoin. The only thing we've yet to witness is an Asic Scrypt miner to make that transition complete.

And since there will be many more people involved when GPU mining is possible, the demand will naturally rise due to more people involved with the coin. Just like Bitcoin, its price is only as high the the people holding are willing to sell at all.

Prices can be crushed down by a few hoarders and dumpers, but to rise consistently, it needs adoption rate in quantity.

Pretty sure that the GPU miner for Primecoin won't be any faster. It's finding prime numbers, using basic arithmetic. This is what CPUs excel at.

[eCoinomist]

Pretty sure that the GPU miner for Primecoin won't be any faster. It's finding prime numbers, using basic arithmetic. This is what CPUs excel at.

That's still theory, Litecoin at the beginning also was thought to be exclusive to CPU only.

[Jaxkr]

Pretty sure that the GPU miner for Primecoin won't be any faster. It's finding prime numbers, using basic arithmetic. This is what CPUs excel at.

That's still theory, Litecoin at the beginning also was thought to be exclusive to CPU only.

Well, I really don't see how a GPU would possibly be faster at that type of math, but OK.

[eCoinomist]

Pretty sure that the GPU miner for Primecoin won't be any faster. It's finding prime numbers, using basic arithmetic. This is what CPUs excel at.

That's still theory, Litecoin at the beginning also was thought to be exclusive to CPU only.

Well, I really don't see how a GPU would possibly be faster at that type of math, but OK.

We just need someone like ckolivas to do it again

[jdebunt]

Without real incentives (shops, stores, games,....) the price won't go up untill the rewards half but i'm going to keep on mining it, because it's a CPU coin, making it accessible for anyone

[Luckybit]

Original article here:
http://ecoinomist.com/xpm-primecoin-price-bottomed

Ever since Primecoin has been on exchange, we have seen quite a radical price swing from as low as 0.0019 to as high as 0.019 (x10 times fluctuation) just within the space of one week.

This is by the far the most profitable altcoin to date for speculators to trade with the typical price swing of 10-20% per day if sold/bought in the right time, with huge initial volume of trading that no other crypto has matched for such an early release stage.

So why has the price hit the floor recently?

Some possible explanations:

A)
While it's not profitable to mine with VPS, such as DigitalOcean or Amazon EC2 any more, the early miners like myself, who mined XPM in the first few weeks were able to mine at a profit even at the current exchange rate of 0.0061, mainly because the difficulty back then was way lower than now. But just like many miners, I saw a very rapid price increase x10 times just within the space of one week, thus suspected XPM might be on big exchanges like BTC-e soon. So I held on and did not sell much.

Now many VPS miners end up with a stash of XPM that they have paid hard cold real world cash for, which for some, due to economical reasons, they might have to sell some in order to recoup back the initial investment.

These are the kind of reluctant sellers, who would only sell just enough to cover his/her overhead -> thus we observe low volume of Primecoin trading lately.
The major Primecoin exchange mcxNow has hit the lowest XPM trading volume ever at ~170 BTC per day.

B)
The only people remain mining XPM right now are the botnets (zero overhead) and VPN operators who have access to server computers at much cheaper prices.
For botnets, obviously the is no need for price consideration when it comes to selling - they make profit at any rate.
This might well be what the current reality is, if we look at the infrequent trading volume that tends to spike out of nowhere:

Whereas in the peak period the trading volume was spread quite evenly between all hours of the day.

In Conclusion

The current Primecoin market is dominated by a few big XPM holders and speculative buyers.
But we shall see some changes very soon, when a working GPU miner comes out, which will certainly even out the playing field for everyone.

Dus tot he difficulty machenics of Primecoins, higher mining power means higher difficulty, which results in fewer XPM rewards per block. And because Primecoin has dynamic difficulty adjustment that changes on a per block basis, it means Primecoin will become a lot more scarce then it is now.

The question is...

How well will Primecoin be received by the GPU community?
Based on this thread, the interest seems to be astronomical.

Also, considering that fact that Litecoin has become increasingly hard to mine, and all the other altcoins really have no true innovation or future, besides pure hype and speculation, Primecoin is the only one at the moment to fill that gap for large and small GPU rig owners.

The problem is not enough volume.

[hasle2]

Pretty sure that the GPU miner for Primecoin won't be any faster. It's finding prime numbers, using basic arithmetic. This is what CPUs excel at.

That's still theory, Litecoin at the beginning also was thought to be exclusive to CPU only.

Well, I really don't see how a GPU would possibly be faster at that type of math, but OK.

An amd 7970 has 2048 cores that can all do arithmetic, a core i7 has 4-6 hyperthreaded cores. The 7970 wins by a long shot when is comes to just doing arithmatic. As far as I understand the weakness of gpu's is that they cannot handle code that has to make if else decisions well.

Bitcoin hashing is just basic arithmatic as well.

[mustyoshi]

Pretty sure that the GPU miner for Primecoin won't be any faster. It's finding prime numbers, using basic arithmetic. This is what CPUs excel at.

That's still theory, Litecoin at the beginning also was thought to be exclusive to CPU only.

Well, I really don't see how a GPU would possibly be faster at that type of math, but OK.

An amd 7970 has 2048 cores that can all do arithmetic, a core i7 has 4-6 hyperthreaded cores. The 7970 wins by a long shot when is comes to just doing arithmatic. As far as I understand the weakness of gpu's is that they cannot handle code that has to make if else decisions well.

Bitcoin hashing is just basic arithmatic as well.

Offloading the primality checking to a GPU should be easy though.

[kelsey]

I disagree that gpu mining will save it, simple problem is outside of mining (and thats now limited), there is no interest in buying XPM. Why? Well why would there be?  XPM has nothing to back itself up, it just seems like a beta test.

gpu might give it another 10min of fame but thats about it.

[hathmill]

Fear not, if primecoin fails there will be millions of primecoin alt forks to pump n dump. Kidding aside, I think what all coins need is a Donation needed! thread to show how sincere the devs are. Well kidding aside, for real, what primecoin needs is merchant adoption, like how wordpress with its 96 bitcoin transactions helped to launch bitcoin to the stratosphere. Kidding aside, the competition in the coin space is darn hard right now. I doubt new coins that dont add new value to the users will overperform in the longrun. What primecoin needs are people willing to invest in creating the infrastructure. All coins but Bitcoin has so far failed miserably. Primecoin could turn out differently who knows.

[eCoinomist]

Fear not, if primecoin fails there will be millions of primecoin alt forks to pump n dump. Kidding aside, I think what all coins need is a Donation needed! thread to show how sincere the devs are. Well kidding aside, for real, what primecoin needs is merchant adoption, like how wordpress with its 96 bitcoin transactions helped to launch bitcoin to the stratosphere. Kidding aside, the competition in the coin space is darn hard right now. I doubt new coins that dont add new value to the users will overperform in the longrun. What primecoin needs are people willing to invest in creating the infrastructure. All coins but Bitcoin has so far failed miserably. Primecoin could turn out differently who knows.

Since Litecoin, Primecoin is the only one to have landed on the hands of many, as the CPU launch gave everyone quite a fair chance of mining, I even got four blocks the first day with my single intel Pentium dual core running the default client.

By comparison, Litecoin was only worth 2cents when it started, Primecoin started with 70cents.

Talking about adoption, even Bitcoin is a miserable failure apart from some tech startups that managed to raise some VC funding.

What we actually need is a large community base of webmasters who, each, have access to thousands of eye balls per day and can throw up an Ad promoting the coin 27/4 on their sites/network of sites. That is why WordPress is powerful - because its users are webmasters.

Hint: I'm among those webmasters, but unfortunately there is no vested interest for me to do so (since I'm late to the Bitcoin game), so for now I better rent that space to traditional advertisers who pay the bill.

[hathmill]

Who-who hold the horses. So you have an insane potential audience for a promotion campaign but have no vested intrest in Bitcoin so you wont do it. Then you say that you were on to Primecoins from the very first day, you create this thread and well... could it be that you will launch a campaign for Primecoins instead? I hope you wait untill the hashrate is sky high before you do it. Also please PM before you start . Kidding aside, I do agree with you. I look at all of these coins not as the future, but as the beginning. Far to many people get trashed by pump n dumps and well, in my opinion these coins here are about something much bigger then that.

For the record, I was also mining Primecoin from day one. Been a Litecoin miner before that and own some Bitcoins as well. Besides those I dont find any other coins interesting. However, if an Asic proof coins comes along that integrates Zerocoin I will be buying like mad.

Fear not, if primecoin fails there will be millions of primecoin alt forks to pump n dump. Kidding aside, I think what all coins need is a Donation needed! thread to show how sincere the devs are. Well kidding aside, for real, what primecoin needs is merchant adoption, like how wordpress with its 96 bitcoin transactions helped to launch bitcoin to the stratosphere. Kidding aside, the competition in the coin space is darn hard right now. I doubt new coins that dont add new value to the users will overperform in the longrun. What primecoin needs are people willing to invest in creating the infrastructure. All coins but Bitcoin has so far failed miserably. Primecoin could turn out differently who knows.

Since Litecoin, Primecoin is the only one to have landed on the hands of many, as the CPU launch gave everyone quite a fair chance of mining, I even got four blocks the first day with my single intel Pentium dual core running the default client.

By comparison, Litecoin was only worth 2cents when it started, Primecoin started with 70cents.

Talking about adoption, even Bitcoin is a miserable failure apart from some tech startups that managed to raise some VC funding.

What we actually need is a large community base of webmasters who, each, have access to thousands of eye balls per day and can throw up an Ad promoting the coin 27/4 on their sites/network of sites. That is why WordPress is powerful - because its users are webmasters.

Hint: I'm among those webmasters, but unfortunately there is no vested interest for me to do so (since I'm late to the Bitcoin game), so for now I better rent that space to traditional advertisers who pay the bill.

[coinerd]

How deep could this thread go before someone points out that there's no use for the coin?

[Jaxkr]

How deep could this thread go before someone points out that there's no use for the coin?

That's not true!
Litecoin, and other scrypt coins are absolutely useless.
Primecoin finds prime numbers, which can be useful for science. It also verifies blocks faster than SHA.

[ruletheworld]

How deep could this thread go before someone points out that there's no use for the coin?

That's not true!
Litecoin, and other scrypt coins are absolutely useless.
Primecoin finds prime numbers, which can be useful for science. It also verifies blocks faster than SHA.

Even though I agree with you in spirit, I highly doubt this coin is going to prove useful to science. It isn't even finding the largest prime numbers, FYI. It's finding prime numbers. Period. It can be used in several places, but hardly for the advancement of science.

[coinerd]

How deep could this thread go before someone points out that there's no use for the coin?

That's not true!
Litecoin, and other scrypt coins are absolutely useless.
Primecoin finds prime numbers, which can be useful for science. It also verifies blocks faster than SHA.

Yes but that's not a use for the COINS.

Mathematicians may run primecoin for the fun of it, or for scientific value.

Miner, traders, and normal people are going to stop running it at some time if there's never any use for the coins it generates.

[jlspartz]

I didn't read all of this but I know the reasons. Mcxnow hold the xpm market. Big players there knew the price could be moved down so did so for a scare, buy up and dump on othrr exchanges that didn't yet move. That brought it from a stable .012 area to .008. Then mcxnow offered fee shares as stocks and a lot of people cashed out xpm to buy shares causing the drop to .006s. Its been holding since. Scaring doesn't detract buyers from scoping up at the current price so its been sustaining even the large 10k dumps.