Is There Any Hope Left?

[Brunic]

Because instead of MINING bitcoins, you can just BUY bitcoins.

Yes, I know.

At the moment prices are less than the cost to mine them, or about the same.

No. My margin of profit is around 50% right now on 1 Bitcoin mined. Why?
-The highest I can pay is 7.5 cents/kwh for electricity. It's possible for me to pay lower than that.
-I use Canadian dollars. 1 Bitcoin give me more $CAN than $US. Since I pay my bills in $CAN, I get more for my money. The 20-30 cents I get in bonus helps a lot.

Each day, I mine Bitcoins for 1.30$ while you buy them for 3$. It's a free world, so buy them if you want. I prefer mining them, since it's cheaper.

Not to mention that buying bitcoins instead of inflating the currency more by mining them will help to drive the price up further.
It ain't June anymore son.

The number of new Bitcoins injected is fixed. Mining more just give me a bigger cut on the 50 BTC bounty on each block. Mining doesn't influence the price at all, since the rate of new Bitcoins stay the same. The only thing mining influence is the difficulty index and the reward you get in your pockets.

[Sargasm]

I'm going to make this short, because I'm more interested in reading your opinions rather than sharing mine. I'm sure most of you have invested in Bitcoins- and I consider even $50 an investment (though a small one). You could have invested when 10,000 Bitcoins were worth $25, or when a Bitcoin was worth about a buck. But do you regret not cashing in your investment earlier? Even I didn't expect the value of a Bitcoin to plummet this low, and despite getting rid of all my rigs and finally uninstalling both the RPC and Diablo miners from my main computer I still check MtGox each day in hopes that the economy will get much better. Then again, I'm a kid, so why should my opinion be taken seriously? The point that I'm trying to get at is, Bitcoins have been drastically falling in value ever since the CosbyCoin incident. At this point, do you intend to sell your investment and make what tiny profit (if any) you can get, or continue "believing" in Bitcoin?
As long as Silk Road is up, I'm sure Bitcoins will still be around regardless of their value. But I can just expect that one day I'll come back here and the whole community will be dead (metaphorically, of course).

One more thing, can someone explain to me how this ISN'T a ponzi scheme? I could have become a millionaire by selling Bitcoins right now if I had known about them from the start.

And finally, how do you think the BTC economy will influence other cryptocurrencies? Or as I call them, knock-offs.

If 50 bucks is a major investment for you, do not try to make a buck speculating on currencies.

[newguy05]

Until a legit company comes and sets up a secure exchange for trading bitcoins, bitcoin will never take off.  Every single major crash bitcoin had so far is due to those shit basement outfits getting hacked or trying to scam its clients themselves. There is little to no faith left in the current list of btc exchanges/wallet holders, and without trust and stable environment to conduct trades, a currency cannot exist.  

The $30 bubble created by the media didnt help the matter, but the main reason bitcoin crashed and will remains at such depressed levels is the fact there is no legit trustworthy exchanges.

We need someone like fidelity or amazon to come in and setup a legit exchange, or a real facebook-type startup to create a secure exchange with a real us company behind it.  I am not holding my breath..

ps: also if the main bitcoin forum (yes i am talking to you admins) can stop getting fucking hacked every 2 sec, it would also help the matter.

[Revalin]

Inflation is theft from the people holding the "whatever", unless you are giving the new "whatever" to every person already holding it, which would be pointless.

Inflation isn't theft if your coins aren't devalued.  If new coins are mined but the exchange rate remains stable, the total economy just gets bigger and you don't lose anything.

We need someone like fidelity or amazon to come in and setup a legit exchange, or a real facebook-type startup to create a secure exchange with a real us company behind it.  I am not holding my breath..

Exchb was great while it lasted.  CampBX looks like it might be a winner too.  I doubt you're going to have established companies jumping in at this stage, but we've had two US-based startups with real people behind them who seem to be taking it seriously.

[shad0wbitz]

Re: Is There Any Hope Left?

No.

Bitcoin is doing just fine. What is nutty is not the recent price drop, but the former $30/bitcoin situation. A bunch of people thought that bitcoin was getting more traction as a household name than what it was (and this is not a bad thing either) and bought a bunch of it at nutty prices.

It is my believe that bitcoin will stabilize at $1.50 and at that point, with all these projects and tools in place, it will become a viable STABLE way to pay and get paid.

From there, will  bitcoin ever reach USD 100 per bitcoin? Sure, but it might take 20 years, AS IT SHOULD BE!