We are on our way to 3.5-3.7!

[wobber]

Is there something that can be done to make bitcoin rally again? What should happen?

Maybe more publicity? The early-adopters sell more so the price gets lower and more appealing?

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[grod]

just a wild guess that somewhere around 15% of mined coins are being sold monthly, up from 10%

I'm pretty sure the actual percentage is _much_ higher - more like 50%-70% I'd say. Of course I don't have any facts to back that up either, but 15% sounds much too low IMHO.

I'm going off of the first MtGox hack having 500k in their trading wallet and 700k during the time of the second suspected hack.  That rate of growth maps roughly to around 10-15% and I'm using that with lots of assumptions as a proxy for # of coins entering circulation.

Of course I don't have any hard numbers, only mtgox and possibly dwolla have those.  I can only guestimate.   But IMO 50-70% is waaaaaaaaay too high of an estimate.

As long as the cryptographic foundations remain sound, I see no reason why it should be game over.

Look at fairbrix.  The fiat value is roughly $0, and so is the hash rate.  It took one guy to pull off a 51% attack.  If the hashing power of bitcoin falls far enough it's only a matter of time till someone does the same thing for "lulz."

Also, the lower the price of Bitcoin, the lower the usefulness for transactions of higher valued things (if you have to pay 10.000 BTC for a pizza, you won't even think of buying a car for Bitcoin).

More importantly, nobody would ever think of selling a car for Bitcoin.  Their risk of actually cashing out at market value is too huge.

[bulanula]

I'm just dying here for parity man !!!

[grod]

Is there something that can be done to make bitcoin rally again? What should happen?

Maybe more publicity? The early-adopters sell more so the price gets lower and more appealing?

Put in more money.  That simple.  Buy a million dollar's worth a few tens of K at a time every time it dips and you'll paint the chart, drive up the price and get more people interested.  You'd get a multiplier effect magnifying your investment.  Cashing out will work in reverse, but so long as you're the first one out you SHOULD make money (it depends on how hard lemmings follow suit).

Once the price drops low enough you could do this with far less $.   Using Tenebrix as an example -- you can cause a huge rally at will with only a thousand dollars or so worth of BTC.  Last week you could do it with $100.  When BTC is at parity you could probably pull off an impressive rally with $20-30k or less.   At 10c, 5k will be enough.

[wobber]

I can come up with 50,000. Me + 4 friends. What would that do?

[fivebells]

It would pay for a truly magical Caribbean holiday for the four of you and your familes.

[grod]

I can come up with 50,000. Me + 4 friends. What would that do?

No.  Get 160 more friends.

In all seriousness, with balls that big I'm surprised you guys fit through doorways.  I hope you're billionares.  I'm well off enough having been a $400/hr consultant during the dotcom boom and to this day having a decent two senor techie income family, doing well enough trading and having two profitable businesses -- but I'd never risk more than pocket change on bitcoin.  Hat off to you.

[wobber]

I can come up with 50,000. Me + 4 friends. What would that do?

No.  Get 160 more friends.

In all seriousness, with balls that big I'm surprised you guys fit through doorways.  I hope you're billionares.  I'm well off enough having been a $400/hr consultant during the dotcom boom and to this day having a decent two senor techie income family, doing well enough trading and having two profitable businesses -- but I'd never risk more than pocket change on bitcoin.  Hat off to you.

But you would risk in something else? Stocks? Forex?

[grod]

I can come up with 50,000. Me + 4 friends. What would that do?

No.  Get 160 more friends.

In all seriousness, with balls that big I'm surprised you guys fit through doorways.  I hope you're billionares.  I'm well off enough having been a $400/hr consultant during the dotcom boom and to this day having a decent two senor techie income family, doing well enough trading and having two profitable businesses -- but I'd never risk more than pocket change on bitcoin.  Hat off to you.

But you would risk in something else? Stocks? Forex?

Oh absolutely.  My "unlimited risk play money" portfolio is about 2 orders of magnitude (almost 3) larger than my bitcoin investment, and it's a prudent tiny portion of my overall net worth -- most of which is exposed to various (yet much lower) risks.

With bitcoin there is ONE exchange.  It's really one guy.  The others are so tiny they might as well be brokers trading out of inventory instead.  With the other markets there are millions of participants.  Here we have a few tens of thousands.  With other markets I have derivatives, with assignment ultimately backed by armed people and jails.  

With bitcoin my potential of losing 100% due to *a single guy* making a mistake or committing fraud is also 100%.  Over and above market risk.

With most other markets not so much.

TL;DR - while bitcoin trading is risky enough the rest of the ecosystem makes the total risk high enough to not be worth current rewards.

[wareen]

just a wild guess that somewhere around 15% of mined coins are being sold monthly, up from 10%

I'm pretty sure the actual percentage is _much_ higher - more like 50%-70% I'd say. Of course I don't have any facts to back that up either, but 15% sounds much too low IMHO.

I'm going off of the first MtGox hack having 500k in their trading wallet and 700k during the time of the second suspected hack.  That rate of growth maps roughly to around 10-15% and I'm using that with lots of assumptions as a proxy for # of coins entering circulation.

Of course I don't have any hard numbers, only mtgox and possibly dwolla have those.  I can only guestimate.   But IMO 50-70% is waaaaaaaaay too high of an estimate.

Ok, fair enough - the truth is probably somewhere in between

Look at fairbrix.  The fiat value is roughly $0, and so is the hash rate.  It took one guy to pull off a 51% attack.  If the hashing power of bitcoin falls far enough it's only a matter of time till someone does the same thing for "lulz."

Ok, fairbrix has been around for how long again? The thing is, Bitcoin is a whole different beast - there's been quite some money been invested by actual businesses and a lot of individuals, the system has proved itself for quite some time and the mining infrastructure has been perfected. Of course, hashrate will drop with the price, but mounting an actual attack against Bitcoin even if it only had 1/10th its current hashing power will be very difficult.

A while ago I also suggested some kind of insurance against such a scenario and I still think it could work: have some considerable hashing power on guaranteed standby, ready to be brought online in case of an attack within 1-2minutes max. I'm sure many would be willing to rent their mining-gear for such a service at a very low rate (think about it: you get money for your computer just sitting there on standby). That way, nearly the same level of security could be maintained at a much lower cost.

[grod]

Ok, fairbrix has been around for how long again? The thing is, Bitcoin is a whole different beast - there's been quite some money been invested by actual businesses and a lot of individuals, the system has proved itself for quite some time and the mining infrastructure has been perfected. Of course, hashrate will drop with the price, but mounting an actual attack against Bitcoin even if it only had 1/10th its current hashing power will be very difficult.

Fairbrix lifespan is irrelevant, it uses equivalent technology to bitcoin.  What is relevant is the hashing power relative to value of destroying the network.  Sure, it's difficult at 1/10th of current hashing power (difficulty of 150k).  How about a difficulty of 15k?

If there is no income to be had from securing the bitcoin network people will flee.  The question is: are there enough believers and people with free power and hardware willing to do this for no compensation relative to those interested in imploding the whole thing for "lulz"?

A while ago I also suggested some kind of insurance against such a scenario and I still think it could work: have some considerable hashing power on guaranteed standby, ready to be brought online in case of an attack within 1-2minutes max. I'm sure many would be willing to rent their mining-gear for such a service at a very low rate (think about it: you get money for your computer just sitting there on standby). That way, nearly the same level of security could be maintained at a much lower cost.

This sounds like a wonderful idea.  I have 1337 googlehash of computing power that I'm willing to sell lower than anyone else.  No, I don't have photos of the hardware at the moment, my camera is broken.  But I'll get them to you just as soon as you pay me.

Aside from fraud and contract enforcement issues it'd be senseless to do this unless the cost of hardware is marginal compared to the value received.  In other words, if it's more profitable to turn the hardware on than leave it off it'll be turned on.  But if it's NOT on, the odds of receiving enough value to pay for hardware before it becomes obsolete are low.

[wareen]

Fairbrix lifespan is irrelevant, it uses equivalent technology to bitcoin.  What is relevant is the hashing power relative to value of destroying the network.  Sure, it's difficult at 1/10th of current hashing power (difficulty of 150k).  How about a difficulty of 15k?

Fairbrix does use a different hashing algorithm - everyony having a bunch of workstations at a company/university or a small Botnet at his disposal can mount an attack at this stage, whereas you'll always need specialized hardware (at least modern AMD GPUs) to attack Bitcoin.

Sure, in the end it's the hashing power that counts, but attacking a CPU only blockchain will always be easier and cheaper than attacking a highly matured GPU-mined blockchain.

A while ago I also suggested some kind of insurance against such a scenario and I still think it could work: have some considerable hashing power on guaranteed standby, ready to be brought online in case of an attack within 1-2minutes max. I'm sure many would be willing to rent their mining-gear for such a service at a very low rate (think about it: you get money for your computer just sitting there on standby). That way, nearly the same level of security could be maintained at a much lower cost.

This sounds like a wonderful idea.  I have 1337 googlehash of computing power that I'm willing to sell lower than anyone else.  No, I don't have photos of the hardware at the moment, my camera is broken.  But I'll get them to you just as soon as you pay me.

Ok, then probably somebody who thought about it some more than you should set up such an insurance service
Seriously though: of course you'd have to make sure that people getting paid have the actual hashing power available by randomly asking them to do some work.

Aside from fraud and contract enforcement issues it'd be senseless to do this unless the cost of hardware is marginal compared to the value received.  In other words, if it's more profitable to turn the hardware on than leave it off it'll be turned on.  But if it's NOT on, the odds of receiving enough value to pay for hardware before it becomes obsolete are low.

I'm not saying that this would pay for somebody building a shiny new standby-mining operation, but all the gamers out there would probably not mind getting some money every month for having their rigs on standby.

The thing is, even if you don't organize this via a formal insurance service, it would probably happen: everybody having a vested interest in Bitcoin might keep some hashing power on standby to prevent an attack - even if the power-cost outweighs the immediate mining reward.

[grod]

Seriously though: of course you'd have to make sure that people getting paid have the actual hashing power available by randomly asking them to do some work.

Still no worries.  I could satisfy the random proof of work when requested and use the hardware for mining during the other times.  Net result: no increase in security, slight increase in reward for me.  Higher cost for the policy because anyone providing the "insurance" would need to factor in doing work at random times.

The thing is, even if you don't organize this via a formal insurance service, it would probably happen: everybody having a vested interest in Bitcoin might keep some hashing power on standby to prevent an attack - even if the power-cost outweighs the immediate mining reward.

Key words: vested interest.  Most of the population has no vested interest in bitcoin.   75% of the current hashing power could very well have low to no vested interest in the future of bitcoin.  From personal experience any hashing power I have is used to produce bitcoin so long as it is profitable.  And if it is not profitable I'm better off selling the hardware on ebay.

Look at namecoin if you want a guestimate of the ratio of devoted fanatics compared to opportunists.  It's about 1:20 fan to greedy SOB.

How many gamers would commit to their machine not being usable for gaming for a few cents to a few dollars a month?  I'm guessing not enough to make this worthwhile.  I won't even go into the entire technical nightmare of getting standby working across the gamut of hardware and software.  Out of 5 machines I have at home and at the office only one older one (Q9400(IIRC) CPU, P35 chipset, mature Gigabyte BIOS, Ubuntu 10.04, nvidia 8800GT) has flawless standby/resume, the other 4 exhibit various degrees of flakiness.  One MSI socket 1156 board has a 100% failure rate to resume from S3 suspend.

It's only a matter of time until APUs are as prevalent in low cost consumer boxes as CPUs are today.  Sure, they'll have 1/4 to 1/8 the computing power of a GPU, but that's about the same ratio as a crappy Grandma-suitable dual core vs a 6 core Phenom II today.  Specialized hardware is only protection today.

[wareen]

Seriously though: of course you'd have to make sure that people getting paid have the actual hashing power available by randomly asking them to do some work.

Still no worries.  I could satisfy the random proof of work when requested and use the hardware for mining during the other times.  Net result: no increase in security, slight increase in reward for me.  Higher cost for the policy because anyone providing the "insurance" would need to factor in doing work at random times.

It wouldn't be too hard to detect and discourage such a fraudulent behavior if it was done on a larger scale but I think we already got off-topic far enough. If you'd like to continue a discussion about the technicalities of such a service then I'd be happy to continue in a separate thread. Regardless of the details, my point is that there are quite some ways to mitigate the risk of an attack on Bitcoin in case of emergency - even if the price is very low.

Most of the population has no vested interest in bitcoin.   75% of the current hashing power could very well have low to no vested interest in the future of bitcoin.

Ok, taking this number you'd still need about 1500 gigahashes to somewhat successfully mount a double-spend attack Bitcoin in a "game over" scenario - not exactly "lulz" in my book. Anyway, all these numbers are far too speculative to be of any practical value IMHO.

It's only a matter of time until APUs are as prevalent in low cost consumer boxes as CPUs are today.

Yeah, but that's still quite a few years away - I don't think that ubiquitous APUs are the biggest threat to Bitcoin but we will see.

[lowlevel]

More importantly, nobody would ever think of selling a car for Bitcoin.  Their risk of actually cashing out at market value is too huge.

For sale.

2008 Mitsubishi Lancer SE, Blue, 5spd
91,000 km  (Canadian car, currently in Toronto area)
Power everything, heated seats, aircon.

Hail damage repaired in 2008, approx $12,000
Gravel damage repaired in 2011, approx $5000

Car mechanically great. New tires, new windsheild, dealer maintained.
New tires, new rear brakes. Needs front brakes.

2600 BTC

[wobber]

Are gonna keep the coins or dump them?

[bulanula]

More importantly, nobody would ever think of selling a car for Bitcoin.  Their risk of actually cashing out at market value is too huge.

For sale.

2008 Mitsubishi Lancer SE, Blue, 5spd
91,000 km  (Canadian car, currently in Toronto area)
Power everything, heated seats, aircon.

Hail damage repaired in 2008, approx $12,000
Gravel damage repaired in 2011, approx $5000

Car mechanically great. New tires, new windsheild, dealer maintained.
New tires, new rear brakes. Needs front brakes.

2600 BTC

Too expensive. Will crash the market at that amount of BTCs !

[wobber]

Not crashing but would impact to some extent.

[lowlevel]

More importantly, nobody would ever think of selling a car for Bitcoin.  Their risk of actually cashing out at market value is too huge.

For sale.

2008 Mitsubishi Lancer SE, Blue, 5spd
91,000 km  (Canadian car, currently in Toronto area)
Power everything, heated seats, aircon.

Hail damage repaired in 2008, approx $12,000
Gravel damage repaired in 2011, approx $5000

Car mechanically great. New tires, new windsheild, dealer maintained.
New tires, new rear brakes. Needs front brakes.

2600 BTC

Too expensive. Will crash the market at that amount of BTCs !

Yeah probably would get us in the $2 range anyway if I were to immediately try to dump them
I just kind of posted it for a laugh... but I am looking to sell the car so I can buy a truck...
So if anyone WERE to buy the car in bitcoins, I'de probably keep 500 bitcoins and dump the rest.

[ineededausername]

This reminds me... just a couple of weeks ago somebody allegedly bought a house for 40k btc or something.