Quote from: maku on November 28, 2016, 02:57:20 AM

geofflosophy I really liked your prediction. I want to share your optimism and I would love your scenario of mass adoption to happen.
One aspect is bothering me, it is still relatively hard for normal people to buy bitcoin, you said that we need to have couple bucks of BTC to use these new services etc.
But do you think that ordinary John will bother to register and verify his identity on bitcoin exchange just to buy $5 worth of BTC for MegaUpload2?

This is becoming less and less of an issue, it was certainly much more of an issue in 2013 than it is now. Really strong mixing in the future will make it even easier.

Quote from: deisik on December 01, 2016, 01:00:25 PM

Quote from: geofflosophy on November 20, 2016, 09:30:56 PM

Mining investment continues, we saw a 10% jump in difficulty at the last adjustment. My pet theory is that it is miners who are providing the liquidity despite most of them being long term bullish, not just to pay expenses but also in an attempt to keep the price artificially low to protect their market share by keeping mining less profitable for new entrants due to upfront costs. But with each dump attempt, the liquidity gets soaked up and held. I believe that this market share protectionism is also primary in the blocking of SegWit as well

This doesn't make much sense overall

If we assumed that you were somehow right (that miners are keeping the price artificially low), then it would make sense to keep the price low at any time, not so much to make mining less profitable for new entrants as to crowd out other miners. But the latter seems to be even more unreal since they are there for profits after all, not for losses, and as you yourself say, most of them are long term bullish, anyway

Well this theory is predicated on the idea that they have mined a ton of bitcoins that they don't have to sell to pay the bills (first because they have investment capital and second because it's so profitable). Another 1/8th of all of the bitcoin ever available will be mined over the next 4 years, some of these miners have 10+% of the network and intend to get those coins into their pocket.

Imagine what will happen to the mining industry when the price of bitcoin is $5k+, when countries invest country amounts of money into building bitcoin mining farms. Will ViaBTC still be funneling 8% of new coins their way?

Quote from: Red-Apple on December 01, 2016, 01:23:45 PM

this theory can not be true only because miners can not hold price down forever and it has been a long time since bitcoin was created and even if you consider it after the shaping of mining farms there is still a good couple of years and no one can really hold price down for that long.

True they cannot keep it down forever, though if they block SegWit they might be able to keep it down for a lot longer.