The digging could be done next week if there was a Bid that could support it. I'm sure the digger is more scared of us, than we are of them. They just want to get their BTC and bounce.
Just a couple of weeks ago there was more than 100 BTC of buy orders at or above the current price. It didn't tempt the digger then. Why do you think it would now?
I've thought further about the conversation in the Just-Dice room last evening and I've been trying to imagine it as if it was Satoshi selling his BTC.
I'm sure some people would want to cut Satoshi off or impose addition "age" fees on the transactions. I don't like it! Let the digger dig!
Maybe it would be a good idea to try having the discussion here too.
I think I started it by saying that CLAM isn't very useful as a currency right now, because we have a huge amount of digging going on, which puts a constant downward pressure on the price, and results in CLAM being a bad investment. Then I asked if people agreed (almost all did) and asked for suggestions as to what if anything we could or should do about it.
I understand Bay's point of view. He has a financial interest in digging continuing as it currently is. But what does anyone else think?
Some suggestions that came up last night:
(this isn't a quote of anything, but I don't know how to make a block of text without saying 'quote')
a) CreativeCuriosity has for a while now had an idea of changing the fee structure for CLAM. It's quite wide-ranging, and aims to stop us ever having to go through the whole "large block" debate that is currently dividing the Bitcoin community. Her plan is to have the block size limit and transaction fees adjust based on historical block sizes such that the market finds its own level. As a part of this the transaction fee would depend on the amount of this an output spent on the blockchain before it could be pruned, since it costs everyone more to store an output for 5 years and to store it for 5 minutes.
While interesting, I don't think this really addresses the problems caused by the ongoing digging activity.
b) Some kind of a hard fork could reduce the value of un-dug CLAMs over time in some way or another.
The reduction could range from a total end to digging (which some argue removes one of the unique selling points of the coin) to such a small reduction that it would have no effect. The hard fork would need to be planned and announced in advance to give people a chance to update their client software, and so the digger would simply dig all his coins before the fork happened, unless he really isn't paying attention.
c) CC seems to be of the opinion that we can just ride this out, and everything will be fine. Since the price of CLAM is down, the digger will for some reason start selling much faster and run out of his stash within a month or two.
I think the reasoning is that he wants a certain number of BTC per day from his dumping, and so that requires ever increasing numbers of CLAM per day - but the dig chart doesn't support that idea. His rate of digging over time seems pretty constant despite the big price drop.
d) Just-Dice should stop using CLAM and use something else instead, with a predictable supply going forward. It could be a fork of CLAM, so everyone keeps their current balance, but on a separate chain.
This seems much like (b), but presumably without the blessing of the CLAM devs. Such a contentious hard fork isn't good for anyone.
Personally I have no idea what's best. I just know that the current situation is making a lot of people unhappy.