No, if the price goes low enough that some miners abandon Bitcoin, the remaining miners make more money. The amount of mining self-adjusts to the price.

We're probably going to see a lot of miners drop out at the halving in 2016. Since miners know that's coming, they've planned their hardware purchases with that in mind. As a miner, you'd like to have your hardware into the profitable portion of its life cycle well before the halving. Expect the hash rate to level off or decline going into the halving.

It doesn't work that way.  A price rise requires more money moving into Bitcoin. A price fall doesn't.

Any idea what the non-bot transaction volume of Bitcoin is?

The Cabbage Patch Dolls operation is still in business. They operate "Babyland General Hospital", where the babies come from. There are tours, fake nurses and doctors, and lots of baby stuff. Cabbage Patch Kids has been running since 1978, decades longer than Bitcoin.

It's a lot like Bitcoin. You have to believe.

Didn't happen. $229 at the end of August.

Ask the people who invested in Cabbage Patch dolls and Franklin Mint collectables how long-term holding worked out.

If it weren't for "hoarding", the price would have gone through the floor by now.

There are still people hanging on for $500,000, or even $1000 again. Read the "I AM HODLING" thread.

Meanwhile, 2015 is the year of "meh" for Bitcoin. $225 ± 25; whenever it gets outside that range, it comes back in a few weeks.

Which Bitcoin kingpin? Karpeles? Ver? Shrem? Ulbright?

Miners make the rules. That's how the system is designed.

The problem is that the design didn't anticipate 2 or 3 mining pools being a majority.

And here we are, around $225 again.  July's brief bubble has deflated, and we're back to the new normal.

Brief history of Bitcoin:

2013: Wow!
2014: Aargh!
2015: Meh.

Karpeles has been re-arrested in Japan, and is now charged with embezzling ¥321 million (US$2.6 million) of customer deposits from Mt. Gox.

This follows the 23-day interrogation over manipulating prices.

For the first half of 2015, the price was $225 ± 25.  That's where it is now. What's the problem?

Bitcoin has had two major runups, both driven by external use cases. The first was Silk Road I drug sales, and the second was getting around China's capital controls. Both of those were shut down. Without a new big use case, there's no particular reason to expect another runup.

Miners, not nodes, determine block size. Only miners can validate a transaction. If miners don't generate bigger blocks, bigger blocks don't happen.

Litecoin is not a "haven" for anything.

If you want to get out of Bitcoin, buy dollars or euros.

Well, Bitcoin has returned to its trading range of $225 ± 25, which was where it was for most of the first half of 2015.

If you're not a miner, the halving shouldn't have much effect.  14.5 million of 21 million bitcoins have already been mined. Everybody knows this event is coming, so it should already be priced in.

If you are a miner, then you're running spreadsheets to see what equipment to keep, what equipment to dump, and what equipment to buy. Much of the older gear will be junked at the halving.

It's a known future event, so it should already be priced into the current price.

As usual, Coindesk has it wrong. See the Japan Times article. This is just a ruling that Bitcoins are fungible. Someone brought a lawsuit demanding the return of the Bitcoins they deposited, as specific items of property. That works if you lent someone a car and they went bankrupt. But not if you lent them, say, a delivery of fuel oil which then went into their tank. This is just a ruling that Bitcoin is more like a commodity than an object.

There's also this entry:

July 22, 2015 (TR-CRB)
GEMINI TRUST COMPANY, LLC
30 West 24th Street, 4th Floor, New York, New York 10010

Application for exemption from the deposit insurance requirements of Section 32 of the Banking Law received.

Uh oh. Potential fraud alert.

Probably little effect.

Ethereum is very complicated. It's also yet another micropayment system, something that's never been successful. All the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There is little interest from the payer side.

However, it is unlikely to be worse than Paycoin.