Quote from: jzcjca00 on March 30, 2013, 03:54:39 AM

Quote from: Melbustus on March 29, 2013, 05:12:56 PM

Quote from: jzcjca00 on March 29, 2013, 03:14:20 PM

All I'm saying is that if more of us will sell a little when the price gets high, and place orders to automatically buy on dips, the price will be more stable, and we will ALL make more money in the long term.

Let's try this again: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner's_dilemma

I'm familiar with the prisoner's dilemma. While game theorists firmly believed that the prisoners would betray each other, are you aware that experiments have shown that actual humans have a natural tendency to act more in cooperation than pure logical self-interest would dictate? It's in our genes to cooperate. I believe many Bitcoin holders will be willing to sacrifice some short-term gain in order to help insure the success of the project.

This is demonstrated by Ron Paul's ability to raise many millions of dollars, even though there is no direct benefit to the donors. It's purely a matter of people cooperating to achieve a common goal.

Interesting point. Indeed, we have some survival of the species genes, not just survival of the fittest...

But that said, I think the pure game theoretic analysis is primary in this case. You might be able to get a couple big ideologically motivated traders to agree (there very well may be a few such early-adopters acting in the market to their slight disadvantage), but getting lots of small time guys to coordinate will be like herding cats.

The grass-roots political donations argument seems like an apt analogy, but the key difference is that there's no immediate profit potential sitting in front of people for them to take advantage of. That'll usually win out.