Why do i keep hearing "btc mined out of thin air" ? thus the price must go down

[Ibian]

And calling mining "real" work is just rude. Plugging in a piece of hardware that someone else built is not work, it's just investing, same as the rest of us are doing. Only with a higher barrier to entry than buying a few coins.

Oh, boy. I guess that you never mined.
"Mining" is much more involved than just plugging in and is more akin to "farming".
The proverbial "cow" sometimes gets sick, overheats, makes strange noises, loses internet connection (hmmm, can cows do that?), etc.
One point is is actually without doubt: No miners-No network. No speculative buying or selling and instead buying or selling strictly for purchases-and network will survive, albeit at lower $$ value, perhaps.

The occasional ISP problem is not even on your end, unless you fucked up somehow (in which case, stop doing that). Overheating would be a flaw from the manufacturers side. It's still just plugging the thing in.

Which is getting off the point. Which is, equilibrium.

[Biodom]

And calling mining "real" work is just rude. Plugging in a piece of hardware that someone else built is not work, it's just investing, same as the rest of us are doing. Only with a higher barrier to entry than buying a few coins.

Oh, boy. I guess that you never mined.
"Mining" is much more involved than just plugging in and is more akin to "farming".
The proverbial "cow" sometimes gets sick, overheats, makes strange noises, loses internet connection (hmmm, can cows do that?), etc.
One point is is actually without doubt: No miners-No network. No speculative buying or selling and instead buying or selling strictly for purchases-and network will survive, albeit at lower $$ value, perhaps.

The occasional ISP problem is not even on your end, unless you fucked up somehow (in which case, stop doing that). Overheating would be a flaw from the manufacturers side. It's still just plugging the thing in.

Which is getting off the point. Which is, equilibrium.

Your point is equilibrium, and my point is that fees have to increase, perhaps dramatically. It will happen sooner or later (once newly mined coins will trickle down slower-in 2016 or the price of bitcoin crashes, whichever comes first).

[Ibian]

And calling mining "real" work is just rude. Plugging in a piece of hardware that someone else built is not work, it's just investing, same as the rest of us are doing. Only with a higher barrier to entry than buying a few coins.

Oh, boy. I guess that you never mined.
"Mining" is much more involved than just plugging in and is more akin to "farming".
The proverbial "cow" sometimes gets sick, overheats, makes strange noises, loses internet connection (hmmm, can cows do that?), etc.
One point is is actually without doubt: No miners-No network. No speculative buying or selling and instead buying or selling strictly for purchases-and network will survive, albeit at lower $$ value, perhaps.

The occasional ISP problem is not even on your end, unless you fucked up somehow (in which case, stop doing that). Overheating would be a flaw from the manufacturers side. It's still just plugging the thing in.

Which is getting off the point. Which is, equilibrium.

Your point is equilibrium, and my point is that fees have to increase, perhaps dramatically. It will happen sooner or later (once newly mined coins will trickle down slower-in 2016 or the price of bitcoin crashes, whichever comes first).

You are wrong. The fees will go down, as they have several times already. And the reason is simple. Part of what makes bitcoin valuable is the ability to move money cheaper than through banks. Once the price rises hundreds or thousands of times the current fee will no longer be cheap.

[pungopete468]

Mining is definitely work, the more mining equipment you manage the more difficult it becomes. Management is a fairly common job and managers expect to be paid. The miner is part of the network, managing your rigs is work.

The fees will go down as the price goes up, the block reward will halve, and the 1MB block size will be increased as the transaction activity picks up...

Mining is definitely work...

[Biodom]

Regardless, there is NOT much growth in transactions, just the growth in difficulty-the only part of the system that is growing. Wallet numbers are BS because 99% of them are empty. If you order anything on many sites, they generate a wallet address, then empty it and it stays empty...forever. Just facts!
Explain this:
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?showDataPoints=false&timespan=1year&show_header=true&daysAverageString=7&scale=0&address=

No growth in transactions-no future. Conclusion: Devs have to provide tools that public can easily use in txns or bitcoin will wither and die.

[pungopete468]

The transaction volume will increase as time goes on. Right now the volume is low at least partially because the current price is less than 50% of the ATH. People are encouraged to hold because many of them don't want to realize the loss.

The growth of the infrastructure and the growth in the volume of transactions aren't directly related. The growth of infrastructure only implies that there is an underlying desire to make transactions and it happens to be growing...

The growth of wallets isn't a tell-all indicator. The rapid growth of zero wallets doesn't signal new adoption but the increase in wallets across the other ranges is a good indicator.

The fact that transaction volume is increasing during a period when the price is dropping is a very good signal.

[BitCoinsLOL]

There seem to be two potential topics for this thread.
1. Mining's effect on the price
2. Mining's viability as a business

I can't tell which one is the topic here, and the OP seems only to address #2. The post is incoherent. Why is there swearing and emotions?

 Because dumbfcks call dumbfcks, dumbfcks with emotion.

[Wilhelm]

If you had bought btc at that time, you would have made EVEN more than mining at lost.
When you pay electrical cost of mining every month, you're essentially "buying" btc every month. If the cost is higher than the market value of btc, you're a sucker for paying above the market value. Ask anyone that calculated mining carefully, if they want btc, would they rather buy or mine? you will get the answer.

I think that markets needs to compensate miners more than pure speculators. Right now, mining is marginally profitable, but it will not be at ~$350 per BTC (average for industry). The situation where essential activity for the whole ecosystem is not supported will be untenable long term and will result either in severe coin scarcity or high transaction costs (eventually). Remember that mining is essential, but speculation is not.

In other words, continued difficulty rise with declining bitcoin price is detrimental to Bitcoin as a whole.

The difficulty can also drop/retarget this makes bitcoin mining just profitable enough so people/companies want to keep mining.
Also miners get transaction fees, if I'm not mistaken, making mining worth while even after the last bitcoin is mined.

Bitcoin mining is a technology driver since better SHA256 and SCRYPT chips arise

In the end we will have solar driven transaction farms in the Sahara desert

(Are we going off topic here?!?)

Mining more coins does not push the price down since work has been done to get the BTC.
Analogy with gold. If we dig are asses off for gold it will not bring the price down. What will bring the price down is if we find an method to turn lead into pure gold, it can now be easily obtained by anyone and the value crashes to the price that represents the amount of work.

[Beans]

The general public is really against bitcoin right now. If you go read user comments on any bitcoin news articles. It's 99-1 against bitcoin. They think it's some kind of imaginary money, printed out of thin air to run a ponzi scheme. Most don't see the distinction between btc and gox either. Some think bitcoin is already dead. I just read this post on yahoo.

You people bought into that bull(s)h(I)t, now buy your way out.

He posted that when the price was at $700. Even my own sister is guilty. She thought I quit mining because bitcoin was about worthless now. Apparently she had been using a gox chart.

We really need to something to turn this around. Gox really burned us bad. If they don't give back the bitcoins they have and liquidate them instead, were pretty screwed.