Price drops when people stop mining?

[rabbitweasel]

Just wanted to see what people think about this question.

I'm guessing that with the recent difficulty increase with some ASICs shipping in Avalon's batch 2 that a larger than average amount of miners left the bitcoin mining network (very likely true). As a result, I think this has led a larger than average amount of bitcoin holders (those that just left mining) to sell off their bitcoins and drive down the price somewhat (plausable cause). There doesn't seem to be a night and day reason for people leaving to sell off their bitcoins other than possibly ex-miners just want to get out of the picture altogether and just sell their bitcoins.

This would seem to propose a particular correlation between the difficulty rating and the price of bitcoins. Specifically I would even say that the rate of change of the difficulty rating (acceleration/decelation) of the network hashrate influences the price of bitcoins in the short term before an adjusted equilibrium is reached between old prices and semi-panic prices.

I'm guessing that with each big increase of the network hashrate due to a new chunk of newly shipped ASICs coming online in the future that the price of bitcoins will drop in the short term when ex-miners dump bitcoins. I know that a significant number of ex-miners will still hold on to bitcoins for investment if that was their overall plan but I'm speculating about the majority of ex-miners who left in a larger than average volume.

Also, a second but semi-related question of mine is what kind of long term effect will this have on bitcoin prices as the total number of people that holds bitcoins falls? I feel bitcoin holds strength in the future if there is a larger userbase so I can't see this scenario meaning anything but a hindrance to the future of bitcoin (something that I think we can all agree on).

I don't want to sound like a bear here as I really want bitcoin to be successful in the long run. I do think though that if more people are aware and discuss the challenges facing bitcoins then this will lead to a more stable bitcoin price future. One that is fueled more by the useful value of bitcoin rather than a future where price is dictated more so by uninformed knee-jerk reaction (like selling bitcoins just to leave the seen altogether mentioned above). Inidividual posts don't really make a difference from random people but I still think that discussion among even a few people will hopefully spread.

Discuss (Flamers welcome???) as I believe awareness will help bitcoins long term future.

[Crypt_Current]

Just wanted to see what people think about this question.

I'm guessing that with the recent difficulty increase with some ASICs shipping in Avalon's batch 2 that a larger than average amount of miners left the bitcoin mining network (very likely true). As a result, I think this has led a larger than average amount of bitcoin holders (those that just left mining) to sell off their bitcoins and drive down the price somewhat (plausable cause). There doesn't seem to be a night and day reason for people leaving to sell off their bitcoins other than possibly ex-miners just want to get out of the picture altogether and just sell their bitcoins.

This would seem to propose a particular correlation between the difficulty rating and the price of bitcoins. Specifically I would even say that the rate of change of the difficulty rating (acceleration/decelation) of the network hashrate influences the price of bitcoins in the short term before an adjusted equilibrium is reached between old prices and semi-panic prices.

I'm guessing that with each big increase of the network hashrate due to a new chunk of newly shipped ASICs coming online in the future that the price of bitcoins will drop in the short term when ex-miners dump bitcoins. I know that a significant number of ex-miners will still hold on to bitcoins for investment if that was their overall plan but I'm speculating about the majority of ex-miners who left in a larger than average volume.

Also, a second but semi-related question of mine is what kind of long term effect will this have on bitcoin prices as the total number of people that holds bitcoins falls? I feel bitcoin holds strength in the future if there is a larger userbase so I can't see this scenario meaning anything but a hindrance to the future of bitcoin (something that I think we can all agree on).

I don't want to sound like a bear here as I really want bitcoin to be successful in the long run. I do think though that if more people are aware and discuss the challenges facing bitcoins then this will lead to a more stable bitcoin price future. One that is fueled more by the useful value of bitcoin rather than a future where price is dictated more so by uninformed knee-jerk reaction (like selling bitcoins just to leave the seen altogether mentioned above).

Discuss (Flamers welcome???) as I believe awareness will help bitcoins long term future.

I stopped reading at the bolded part.  How is the truth of that statement "very likely"?
I live off mostly BTC mining, and I still use GPUs...

[rabbitweasel]

Mostly I'm guessing from the rather stagnated growth rate in the past week after the ASICs came online. Growth anyways that has been concave down as a result of ASICs in the past few weeks leading to the shift to concave down growth in the past week.

Since TLDR applied to you, I think you missed the point I was making regardless of how true the statement was. That is that people will sell off their bitcoins when they leave the network. Though I'm not sure if the absolute number of miners on the network is decreasing or not. People are leaving as it becomes difficult to mine but new people hear about bitcoins and I don't know which is more influencing on the number of people around. I think it would be cool if someone had info on that subject.

[Crypt_Current]

Mostly I'm guessing from the rather stagnated growth rate in the past week after the ASICs came online. Growth anyways that has been concave down as a result of ASICs in the past few weeks leading to the shift to concave down growth in the past week.

Since TLDR applied to you, I think you missed the point I was making regardless of how true the statement was. That is that people will sell off their bitcoins when they leave the network. Though I'm not sure if the absolute number of miners on the network is decreasing or not. People are leaving as it becomes difficult to mine but new people hear about bitcoins and I don't know which is more influencing on the number of people around. I think it would be cool if someone had info on that subject.

I follow you -- I disagree with your point, from my own experience:
In mid-2012 I was forced to move to a place where I could not readily set up my mining operation.  I was not mining for a few months.  I did NOT sell anything.  (I did use some to pre-order with BFL...)

[rabbitweasel]

Mostly I'm guessing from the rather stagnated growth rate in the past week after the ASICs came online. Growth anyways that has been concave down as a result of ASICs in the past few weeks leading to the shift to concave down growth in the past week.

Since TLDR applied to you, I think you missed the point I was making regardless of how true the statement was. That is that people will sell off their bitcoins when they leave the network. Though I'm not sure if the absolute number of miners on the network is decreasing or not. People are leaving as it becomes difficult to mine but new people hear about bitcoins and I don't know which is more influencing on the number of people around. I think it would be cool if someone had info on that subject.

I follow you -- I disagree with your point, from my own experience:
In mid-2012 I was forced to move to a place where I could not readily set up my mining operation.  I was not mining for a few months.  I did NOT sell anything.  (I did use some to pre-order with BFL...)

I'm hoping that I'm wrong anyways and that there are more people like you. Myself I have significantly downsized my mining operation (selling off hardware) but I still hold >85% of my bitcoins that I've mined.

I feel like I'm indirectly making a point that the more bears there are around, the less n00bs will hear of bitcoin and get into it and inflate a bubble. I feel a smaller base of bitcoin believers is better than even a much larger base consisting of n00bs who will bring instability to prices and thus bitcoin reliability and its future.

[mgio]

The recent increase in mining difficulty has absolutely nothing to do with the current price stagnation.

You'd think that miners would be forced to sell coins to offset their electricty cost, right? That's the opposite of what you are saying.

[rabbitweasel]

Yea, that's not what I meant. I was saying I think a majority of people leaving pools just want to be done with bitcoins and sell them having nothing to do with covering costs of electricity which would be much less than the cost of the GPUs or FPGAs bought in recent time anyway. This is why I'd be interested in some sort of statistic in seeing people holding bitcoins compared to price. Best I think we have is active addresses which doesn't tell us much though I at least imagine there is an average number of addresses per person.

[Malawi]

I'm thinking that people stopping mining because of difficulty would rather hold on or sell based of completely different circumstances. After all they have seen that even though the price might fall, it may also rise again.

Rather than selling all their BTC, I would think they are more likely to hoard them, use them or stay in the market (selling/buying).
After all it can be a bit of a pain to get fiat in/out of BTC.