Quote from: hgmichna on April 13, 2013, 11:17:52 AM

Quote from: Photonfrog on April 12, 2013, 06:51:12 PM

Quote from: hgmichna on April 12, 2013, 06:31:17 PM

Quote from: Photonfrog on April 12, 2013, 05:31:28 PM

If this poll manages to aggregate a decent guesstimate for the number of hurt individuals we might get an idea about how long it will take to replace all of them with new people.

Your question is aiming at an irrelevancy.

Is it really irrelevant?

I'll have to defend its relevancy somehow as we are currently looking at speculating about the consequences of a burst bubble.

Consider the case that there was only one single individual who bought all of the "profitless" bitcoins and then this person failed to sell any of them at a profit. This hypothesis has a single loser and everyone else is a "winner". If this hypothesis was to be true (in our fantasy world) then the emotional consequences of a burst bubble should be close enough to zero to matter at all. In this case the system has in practice been sponsored towards greater success in the future.

In the opposit case we have a quite more significant emotional impact. Imagine the case that only one rich person had possession of all bitcoins except for those that were bought at more than 70 usd. Then this rich person is the only individual who manages to sell any coin at a profit during the bubble burst. In this case we have quite a significant emotional impact from the bubble and it will be quite a challenge to recover some semblance of faith in the bitcoin system as a whole. It would be really hard to consider bitcoin a viable technological innovation in the future.

Reality will be found somewhere between these extremes. It should however be leaning towards one or the other extremes and the impact should adjust with the position along this imaginary axis.

Let me put it this way: I want the negative emotional impact maximized, because I want the idiots who destabilize and damage the bitcoin market to disappear.

The destabilizers are those who buy high and sell low, i.e. exactly those who lose their money.

The only way to achieve this goal is to forever suppress the market value of the coins. Greedy people with no better purpose than looking for easy money will always try to get in if there is a profitable trend going. This popped bubble provided a painful experience for a microscopic portion of all the greedy people on the internet. Next time the value starts climbing a new crowd will take their place.

We can also look at this argument as one which concludes that the greedy people are needed, otherwise the bitcoin system will stay just where it is and fail to be adopted wider. It looks quite much like someone is trying to suppress the value of the coins right now... Eventually this will run out of steam and the greedy crowd will come running in.