Solution. CT recycling.
CTs should be able to be recycled or combined with other CTs to prolong their life or at least do SOMETHING with all those CTs that are useless.

First, 60 days of EP needed to drive a Riv MK II. That's not something casual miners are going to invest in. Second, most dedicated miners are already in Riv MK II's simply because they are worth it. lastly, the market price doesn't reflect the true cost of building a MK II, it reflects how rarely they are made because of demand; not because of the cost of manufactoring.

i will have a demand for two riv mk2's and one symbiont mk2 in about ... 3 weeks.

their current market price is... hmm, i bit to high for my taste.

for three weeks i't trying to get hold of at least one 25% light bot CTs -> they are nothing worth , but i dont get a single one, even for 100k per CT...

I have plenty of 50's & 75's CTs, thank you very much, both combat and industrial, and the ones I don't find, I buy cheap enough.  Edit: and BTW I resent that second statement.

My purpose was not to avoid paying for a 75 (though anyone who pays 30 for anything but a heavy combat mech CT is a fool - It'll degrade to 50 before they get their 30 back - better just find/buy a 50). I just don't have the heart to destroy my 25's and I think it's just wrong that the worst and most common artifact find (few fragments and a low level decoder) is worth more than a relatively rare CT. 

Something is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. Are you paying 30 mil for 75s? If so, I got some to sell you gladly! And if you're not willing to pay for something, your statement of its worth has no credibility.

And yes, there are 10 people out there who would buy a 25 to upgrade their bot.  In fact, I got lucky when all CTs were still scare and managed to sell one.  But there are hundreds of 25s sitting in people's storage now (I have 14 myself and I only do artifacts casually). The market is beyond flooded with 25s. They are essentially worthless.

My own personal prefence is to make them usable for research, not combinable, though usefull for repairing a degraded CT as someone suggested sounds OK too.

As for how great the MK2 industrials are, sure they are better than regular ones, and certainly worth it if you're getting it from your corp. I personally don't intend to do a run of any of them because I don't want to tie up a few K of briochit in bots that take me 2 months to sell off if I'm lucky (and those are the lights and assault industrials for which many people already have the EP/skills and which at least sell slowly.)

what market do you speak about ? certainly not the ingame market window since I cannot find CTs there. forums don't count as a market for many people.

recycling CTs sound stupid...  what do you get out of it? a bunch of bits and bytes?

or a 3 metachropin that was used to create a crystal miniature ?

Seems you have never seen me mining...

Bits and bytes are info. Info is a product of research and generally useful.

In any case, even if I grant that MK2 industrials are useful enough to build & buy (let's just leave at that we agree to disagree), as I said at the outset, that is the minor problem.  The big problem is the 25% MK2 CTs, whose only use right now is as storage wallpaper.

As the game is currently structured, the ONLY items besides MK2 CTs that cannot be reduced to something at least minimally useful (and therefore at least minimally valuable) are kernels, MK2 cpus, and decoders (and level 1-3 decoders suffer from the same problem as 25s - huge oversupply).  Kernels and cpus have found supply-demand equilibrium points and have managed to retain some value (slowly rising for kernels and slowly falling to steady for cpus), so they don't need floors under their values. The 25s are a disaster area, they need something that puts a floor under their value by allowing them to be removed from the game in exchange for something else which has at least some minimal value.  You want to debate what that mechanism should be, fine. I think it would be a useful discussion. I have my preferences, but I'm ultimately agnostic with respect to what the solution should be. I just think a solution is sorely needed.

He's looking for a single one and if he posted on the trade channel this weekend he'd probably have 5 offered to him. Like I said even if there are 9 others like him out there, there are more 25's in game than the max number of players logged in during prime time. The market isn't just flooded with them, it's tsunamied (if that's a real word).  There is absolutely no way to absorb them all with the current game mechanics.

by the time there's 100 more players there'll be 200 more 25s and so on. It's not like they're going to stop dropping.

And as I said above, information has value.

"Shuffling the 'worthless' to another item" is what I'm advocating, as long as that other item is not also worthless.  It doesn't have to be worth a lot, but it should be worth something.

if you want to be able to recycle CTs into research - then please only MK2 CTs

imagine the exploit level if you could do this with regular ones

that's quite stupid. calling it market does not mean the same to all people. CTs should have a category in the general market.

these "unifficial" trading channels do kill the ingame market. we need some kind of public contracting in addition to the market window to make the market work better.