Gold collapsing. Bitcoin UP.

[oakpacific]

In a natural and free ecosystem waste =food, the waste heat in mining will be put to good use soon.

In the future when humans can make routine interstellar trips and  everything is powered by natural or man-made nuclear fusion reactors, we could well be creating matters directly out of the waste energy of mining farms, which itself is used to record blockchain information at a sub-nuclear level, the ultimate amalgam of Bitcoin and Gold.

Unfortunately, physics is a thing and this is not possible.

I could well tell you this is possible, it's just a problem of scale and efficiency(future miners may use laser beams and nonlinear optical components for calculation), we create matters with accelerators and reactors nearly everyday, when the information density reaches such a level that it has to be recorded at sub-nuclear level the relevant technologies will be ready.

[KFR]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

[oakpacific]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

[marcus_of_augustus]

...
seems like just yesterday when we passed silver.
...

Indeed, it does. I remember when we passed silver, thinking something like: "Well, that was fun. Next stop gold, but it'll be a few years.". Heh.

Yup, I wouldn't for the life of me have thought that we would catch up to gold this year already.

i didn't think so either back then.

but i started to get an inkling that we might back in the summer when the HR kept escalating, escalating, and then going parabolic while the price just stagnated in the last 6 mo consolidation.  i mine b/c i like to hang out in the Custom Hardware forum to get a feeling about how miners think and what they are doing.  most of them never venture over here to Speculation and vice versa.  they have their own community and compulsive way of thinking that help educate my speculation/investment mindset.  during the summer, we miners were undergoing our own form of breathtaking action in the HR while all the speculation guys were over here wringing their hands about a plunge back to 2.  i kept saying in my newsletter we were going to get a "snap UP" to catch the price back up to the HR.  guys like Frozenlock kept arguing with me saying that price always leads HR.  i even caught evoorhees making a case that mining was irrelevant to the price over on Reddit.  not in this case.  you could easily see that millions of fiat dollars were being poured into the new gold rush of Bitcoin mining by old and new miners alike somehow thinking they could easily get in on the groundfloor of the new asic mining machines.  there was a mentality going around that somehow mining would be more lucrative than outright BTC buying, especially after the price had gone to the "bubble high" of 266.  the different buckets of the Bitcoin economy were being filled by raining fiat in an asymmetric pattern with the mining bucket first overflowing.  i knew we were going to get that snap UP especially after we double bottomed at 65.  i said it more than once in my letter.  i could see the frustration and disgust creeping into the miners from the rising difficulty and you could start to pick out more and more comments about giving up mining and going to buy BTC directly around Aug/Sept.  and sure enough, we got that snap UP.  but i didn't think we'd come this far this fast.  

that is, until it became clear to me that we are in a logarithmic progression.

... and here is all the evidence you need to know that cost of production places a floor underneath bitcoin pricing ... as it does for many other real world commodities.

It is one of the reasons that I got into btc in the first place ... it would never go to zero as long as there is some small demand ... and in fact it would never go far below cost of production because at that point it is cheaper to go and buy in the open market instead of mining. Now the really interesting thing is as the difficulty keeps climbing due to technological advances and greater energy inputs the cost of production is rising all the time also ... effectively placing a rising floor underneath btc pricing.

[Vycid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

[oakpacific]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

I can understand that you just know too little about physics after all, none of what I said violates any fundamental law of physics, in fact the humanly possible laser power is not too far away from the level required to create electron pairs out of vacuum.

[Vycid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

I can understand that you just know too little about physics after all, none of what I said violates any fundamental law of physics, in fact the humanly possible laser power is not too far away from the level required to create electron pairs.

I'm a semiconductor process engineer.

Also, virtual particles are not matter.

[oakpacific]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

I can understand that you just know too little about physics after all, none of what I said violates any fundamental law of physics, in fact the humanly possible laser power is not too far away from the level required to create electron pairs.

I'm a semiconductor process engineer.

That doesn't say anything about your knowledge of optical information processing, or lasers over all, or even fundamental physics.

[Vycid]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

I can understand that you just know too little about physics after all, none of what I said violates any fundamental law of physics, in fact the humanly possible laser power is not too far away from the level required to create electron pairs.

I'm a semiconductor process engineer.

That doesn't say anything about your knowledge of optical information processing, or lasers over all, or even fundamental physics.

sigh I'm probably getting trolled.

In a natural and free ecosystem waste =food, the waste heat in mining will be put to good use soon.

In the future when humans can make routine interstellar trips and  everything is powered by natural or man-made nuclear fusion reactors, we could well be creating matters directly out of the waste energy of mining farms, which itself is used to record blockchain information at a sub-nuclear level, the ultimate amalgam of Bitcoin and Gold.

1) Waste energy and ultra-high frequency coherent light used by some hypothetical optical processor are very different things. One is waste and cannot do useful work, and the other is useful energy that can do work.

2) As I pointed out, virtual particles are not matter and cannot be usefully used for the storage of information, since they do not obey the mass-shell relation.

3) "the ultimate amalgam of Bitcoin and Gold" wat. Surely you don't imply your superlaser-powered photonic processors would be creating gold particles? Because that'd belie a rather poor grasp of the physics you've accused me of not understanding.

By the way, coherent light at a frequency high enough to produce virtual particles (which cannot be produced by stimulated emission and therefor cannot come from a laser like you suggested) would absolutely wreck whatever kind of photonic metamaterial is responsible for the information processing.

[oakpacific]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_of_thermodynamics

Think about it, what will you use as carriers of information in your future processors? The bandwidth has to match up to the processing capability of processors(reason why will measure it  in terms of Hertz, a unit for frequency) in the end you will use photons, nothing but photons.  As your bandwidth increases, you need to use higher and higher frequency laser-beams, which translates to higher and higher energy photons, when your  photon energy reaches the level of electron rest energy, electron-pairs start to be created out of Dirac sea.

Were you dropped on your head as a child?

I can understand that you just know too little about physics after all, none of what I said violates any fundamental law of physics, in fact the humanly possible laser power is not too far away from the level required to create electron pairs.

I'm a semiconductor process engineer.

That doesn't say anything about your knowledge of optical information processing, or lasers over all, or even fundamental physics.

sigh I'm probably getting trolled.

In a natural and free ecosystem waste =food, the waste heat in mining will be put to good use soon.

In the future when humans can make routine interstellar trips and  everything is powered by natural or man-made nuclear fusion reactors, we could well be creating matters directly out of the waste energy of mining farms, which itself is used to record blockchain information at a sub-nuclear level, the ultimate amalgam of Bitcoin and Gold.

1) Waste energy and ultra-high frequency coherent light used by some hypothetical optical processor are very different things. One is waste and cannot do useful work, and the other is useful energy that can do work.

2) As I pointed out, virtual particles are not matter and cannot be usefully used for the storage of information, since they do not obey the mass-shell relation.

3) "the ultimate amalgam of Bitcoin and Gold" wat. Surely you don't imply your superlaser-powered photonic processors would be creating gold particles? Because that'd belie a rather poor grasp of the physics you've accused me of not understanding.

By the way, laser light at a frequency high enough to produce virtual particles would absolutely wreck whatever kind of photonic metamaterial is responsible for the information processing.

This is cypherdoc's thread and I have long been used to rant whatever I have in mind here, with only vague connection to what's being discussed, sorry if it brings confusion.

Yes per the definition of waste energy to think they can be used to create matters is ridiculous, what I meant is more along the line of "still highly energetic photons after being used for calculation", and information recording would certainly not happen at pair production time, it has to be afterwards, and we haven't even started with the creation of protons and neutrons, which is completely another matter, in fact it would be silly if you choose to create subatomic particles yourself rather than using the protons that is already abundant in the Universe, the whole rant is actually a response to goldbug's claim that Bitcoin is not physical and thus have no real value, so the gold thing is completely metaphoric.

Solid metamaterials will be wrecked, but plasmas can support light-bending up to the desired energy level very well, and by the way, after the electron-pairs are created they are as real as the electrons in your bread and not virtual anymore. And stimulated emission would work just fine, you can use highly accelerated free electrons to produce coherent radiations, not just orbit electrons.

[wachtwoord]

I'd noticed it but dismissed it as a great example of "(time-lagged) correlation is not causation". OOPS.

^^I did the same thing. now I'm not sure anymore. The other way around just seemed so much less complex (and less complex is generally more likely).

[Spaceman_Spiff]

CD, you are one of the very few who saw that price follows difficult, very cool


every time i say that people tell me im a witch!

Yeah it took me a while to realize it, because at first it looks like a typical economic fallacy, maybe like the Labor Theory of Value sneaking in. But cypher is exactly right, people are trying to get BTC and they see two ways: buy or mine. If everyone is piling into mining, that will push the price lower than it otherwise would have been. That means, for instance, in the summer when the price was range-bound and everyone was jumping into mining, the price should have been continuing its exponential growth with no slowdown. All that happened was some of that growth was siphoned off into the mining sector even as the network effects continued and Bitcoin kept mushrooming. That excess started to slosh back into Bitcoin in October.

yeah i know, i assumed it was the other way around, but when you read the charts, no way to deny it.


just wait until this next round of asics (jan to mark) makes the rate go crazy again!  next sumer we will see $5,000 easy

I am still not convinced that there is such a direct link between the hash rate and the price.  I am starting to see now that production of bitcoin is a somewhat different animal than regular goods production, in that the "industry" is not solely composed out of producers trying to make a product for the customers to buy, while trying to keep production costs under the price of the sold product to earn a profit, but that for a number of miners it is an alternative way to 'buy' bitcoins.  
But given that knowledge, isn't the amount of money being put into mining hardware the important factor that shows demand for bitcoins on the mining side, and not mining power per se (meaning that efficiency increases don't really matter)?

[Spaceman_Spiff]

...
but i started to get an inkling that we might back in the summer when the HR kept escalating, escalating, and then going parabolic while the price just stagnated in the last 6 mo consolidation.  i mine b/c i like to hang out in the Custom Hardware forum to get a feeling about how miners think and what they are doing.  most of them never venture over here to Speculation and vice versa.  they have their own community and compulsive way of thinking that help educate my speculation/investment mindset.  during the summer, we miners were undergoing our own form of breathtaking action in the HR while all the speculation guys were over here wringing their hands about a plunge back to 2.  i kept saying in my newsletter we were going to get a "snap UP" to catch the price back up to the HR.  guys like Frozenlock kept arguing with me saying that price always leads HR.  i even caught evoorhees making a case that mining was irrelevant to the price over on Reddit.  not in this case.  you could easily see that millions of fiat dollars were being poured into the new gold rush of Bitcoin mining by old and new miners alike somehow thinking they could easily get in on the groundfloor of the new asic mining machines.  there was a mentality going around that somehow mining would be more lucrative than outright BTC buying, especially after the price had gone to the "bubble high" of 266.  the different buckets of the Bitcoin economy were being filled by raining fiat in an asymmetric pattern with the mining bucket first overflowing.  i knew we were going to get that snap UP especially after we double bottomed at 65.  i said it more than once in my letter.  i could see the frustration and disgust creeping into the miners from the rising difficulty and you could start to pick out more and more comments about giving up mining and going to buy BTC directly around Aug/Sept.  and sure enough, we got that snap UP.  but i didn't think we'd come this far this fast.  

that is, until it became clear to me that we are in a logarithmic progression.

The "hashrate leads" theory is extremely interesting.

Equilibrium price comes at the point where the number of bitcoins people want to buy equals the number of bitcoins people want to sell. That means that for meaningful price movement to occur, something needs to happen for people to want to hold their bitcoins tighter, or something needs to happen for people to want to buy more coins.

And you're right; probably tens of millions were spent on mining-related hardware in the past 6 months, because difficulty was low and everyone had it in their head it was a prudent investment (I admit, I was one of them; tried to get a number of Klondike miners with the loose Avalon chips). That's fiat people DON'T want to spend on coins.

But at some point the hashrate grows to a point where it's clearly NOT a prudent investment any longer, and that money diverts to bitcoins themselves, driving the price up to the point where price clearly outstrips hashrate again (in that sense, mining is critical to restraining price growth to sane levels !).

That raises questions about the other "buckets" of the greater Bitcoin economy, too. What's the macro effect of altcoins? During a runup, they seem to outperform bitcoins and put downward pressure on the system... but during bear markets the money flows back out to Bitcoin and helps balance out the price. Seemingly the altcoins are also a ballasting/moderating influence on the system.

Beautifully put chaps.  Should become recommended reading for anyone in this forum imho.

Agreed, insightful posts.  While the occassional blabbering and trolling on this forum is fun, this is the stuff I really like to read.  

[NewLiberty]

HR leads, but then it also follows, until it leads.

[cypherdoc]

HR leads, but then it also follows, until it leads.

i never meant to imply that it's a rule that HR always leads.

it's just that it was so clear this past summer/fall given the fundamentals at the time.

[cypherdoc]

Gold collapsing.  Bitcoin UP.

[BadBear]

I've got about 5% in silver, 2-3% in gold. I like stacks of shinies, what can I say. I don't really care what it does short or mid term, that's more for many years down the road at least, or even for my kids/grandkids.

[GriTBitS]

to Da moon and heres why!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pID03RrmKow&noredirect=1

[User705]

Anyone think the chinese announcement has more to do with their desire to have yuan be the reserve currency and they don't want bitcoin mucking up their plans?  Also aren't they due to release their gold holding number soon.  

[vokain]

Anyone think the chinese announcement has more to do with their desire to have yuan be the reserve currency and they don't want bitcoin mucking up their plans?  Also aren't they due to release their gold holding number soon.  

Probably fear related. It's okay, it's just part of the process.