Quote from: Nullu on December 31, 2013, 10:56:00 PM

Quote from: atheistftwins on December 31, 2013, 10:52:17 PM

Quote from: YoyodyneSystems on December 31, 2013, 10:46:59 PM

Quote from: atheistftwins on December 31, 2013, 10:23:31 PM

Quote from: Nullu on December 31, 2013, 10:15:19 PM

Quote from: atheistftwins on December 31, 2013, 10:12:31 PM

Coins are different from the stock market in that there is a projected future cash flow from ownership in shares of companies. Coins are purely a speculative vehicle and thus "corrections" that occur when a stock crashes due to its price way exceeding the fundamental value of the company can not happen in this market. If people truely "believe" that CAT is worth any amount, it will be worth that amount here, there is no cash flow to be concerned about, it's just pure supply demand. Thus "manipulations" don't always lead to a "correction" since once the price goes up, if most people accept that price as the new "correct" price then it is in fact the correct price and there is nothing that they can prove them otherwise. Added to the fact that all these coins have super low market caps and a lot of whales moving in and out and playing the daytrading game means that you can't confidently say price reflect market sentiment even. It's what makes coin investing so risky and fun as well as lucrative.

tl;dr Coins have no cash flows attached to them, thus price doesn't tell you anything about the "value" of the coin at any given time.

That makes it really hard to speculate whether the coin will increase or decrease in value. Do the stock charts bear any indications similar to stock exchange charts?

In big markets like BTC where there are a lot of "chartists" (People who think they can predict stock movement based on historical price movements), it becomes like a self fulfilling prophecy where a shape appears and a bunch of people decide it's time to buy/sell thus moving the price in that direction. In most altcoin markets, this doesn't exist since the market is too small.

In these markets, ONLY supply demand rules over everything else. As people have pointed out correctly in this thread, the fact that there are few coins being mined means that supply is shrinking. If demand is constant or goes up, then yes price will indeed go up.

The problem UNIQUE to CAT is that it's block confirmation times copy that of BTC which as I stated in a previous post is a MISTAKE. You want demand to go UP for price to go up. But as blocktimes increase, people will be LESS inclined to trade CAT instead of say DOGE or Kitteh with much shorter confirm times. Because of the annoyingly long block times, demand is currently stagnating. Having 10 min block times is not a good idea even if it copies BTC because one of the most fundamental improvements altcoin added to crypto was having SHORTER block times, thus this is a regression and not an innovation to go back to 10 min.

If demand doesn't go up because of this inconvenience, and supply continues to shrink. Price will STILL not go up. Instead volume will decrease and slowly CAT will die.

I don't want this event to happen, I pointed it out previously that CAT should have had 5 coin block rewards at 1 minute intervals to compete with other coins. If this can be changed somehow, CAT demand will increase and it will have a chance again.

Have a chance again Huh

The coin is one of the top coins in the world now. In just a week.
I think you are trying to crash the price to buy back in.

The reason this was not an issue before this last retarget is due to the fact that previously the difficulty cap kept block times very short (2-5 min in the last two retargets). This is comparable to altcoins as a whole and incentivizes MORE miners to continue mining instead of less. Right now the difficulty/price is such that it incentivizes miners to leave instead of new ones to come.

This is a pivotal moment in this coin and the community needs to actually come to terms with the problem instead of brushing it under the rug and claiming that promotion is the only way to increase the value of the coin.

We can not ignore the miners since they also play a vital role in a crypto ecosystem. It must be properly balanced so that the interests of the investors line up with the interests of the miners.

I am certainly not trying to crash the coin. I have thousands of dollars currently invested in it and if it crashes it would be disasterous for me. I am trying to improve the coin so that it remains competitive with other altcoins, more of which pop out every day.

I do see the point you're trying to make. It also slows down transaction times, correct? If the amount of hashpower doesn't increase significantly after the next difficulty increase, what sort of block times would we expect?

At this current point in time, the difficulty will not increase during the next retarget. It will go down again in order to try to line up with the target of 10 minute block times. My point is that 10 minute block times are way too high to remain competitive in the altcoin market.

Bitcoin makes it work ONLY because it is the first. It has the power of hype and mainstream publicity to keep the prices high. We are not like that, we need to be innovative and IMPROVE upon bitcoin in order to compete against it.

Yes, we should continue to promote CAT but we should be able to say to potential investors WHY we are better than bitcoin and as a result why they should invest in it.

Very short difficulty retargets also DON'T destabilize the coin, it STABILIZES it. The goal of a difficulty retarget is to keep the block times according to target. The shorter the retarget, the less likely we have situations where difficulty is very low compared to price and a HUGE amount of miners rush in pushing block times extremely low, then when it retargets, a HUGE amount rush out leaving blocktimes painfully high.

The shorter the retarget, the more it keeps in line with that. If nothing else, and the community is REALLY against making block times shorter than 10 minutes, at the very least change the retarget block count so we don't repeat the problem we are having right now.