But, the supply of Bitcoins is unchanged by these dynamics and thus no price effect (other than perhaps short-term confused traders who don't understand this
).
There will be a change to whom the coins are distributed, however. During this year, GPU mining saw a pretty big shift. GPU mining occurs much less today in regions where the cost of electricity is prohibitive for GPU mining (e.g., much of Europe, and California .. thanks to tiered consumption pricing). Those in these regions have mostly sold their GPUs and purchased in their place were FPGAs (e.g., BFL singles). But $600 of FPGA hardware yields many fewer hashes (and thus fewer BTCs) than $600 of GPU hardware, so there is proportionally fewer bitcoins returned per dollar of investment in those regions. Of course those who have free electricity (e..g, utilities included in rent, or are mining at a workplace, etc.) are the exception here.
But these GPUs that have dropped in price are still being snapped up by those in other regions which have inexpensive electricity (e.g, Russia, and Venezuela even whose governments subsidize their utilities, and parts of Canada and U.S., particularly near hydro generation). Miners in these areas are still quite profitable when mining using GPUs.
But their advantage will, for a period of time, disappear with ASIC as the power consumption drops to being just a relatively tiny part of the cost of mining. So ASICs are the great geographic equalizer as far as removing the prevalence for mining to occur where the cost of electricity is low.
But because ASICs are so costly yet, we still won't see them being operated except mostly by those with excess capital (or access to investment capital that would be willing to go for the purchase of ASIC mining hardware). e.g., the kid who could rationalize the purchase of a nice GPU because it could also be used for gaming will have a much harder time pullling the trigger to spend a thousand dollars for an ASIC.
Now whether the ASIC miners will be more likely to accumulate bitcoins versus today's GPU miners, that's something we just don't know yet. People with GPUs might have been cashing in many of the bitcoins as they earn them to pay for the electric bill whereas now with ASICs, there is hardly any monthly recurring expenses ... so why wouldn't they just accumulate their coins then?
There were a number of miners who took loans to buy ASIC hardware (in the more recent months by charging on their credit cards) so those miners will probably be selling everything they earn for the first year, but the others who purchased ASICs earlier paid using bitcoins so there is little reason to think they'll be pressured into cashing out their bitcoins.
I was previously leaning towards there being not really much further upside pressure on the exchange rate as a result of both the block reward subsidy halving (to 25 BTC per block) coming later this month and ASIC coming soon after, but now I'm getting the sense that a lot of people have many fewer bitcoins than they wanted to have by this point in time.
This comes partly from those who spent their coins on ASIC hardware and now realize that with four or so ASIC manufacturers, their investment in ASIC hardware might not be the magic bullet that would cause them to end up with coins coming out the wazoo. So if they want a guarantee that they'll end up with a decent share of coins, they might start thinking of buying some just in case their ASIC doesn't end up being the lucrative deal it once seemed to be.
And so many others lost significant amounts of coins to pirate, bitfloor, glbse, hacked accounts, and whatever other reasons that if the exchange rate starts to head north -- there could end up being some significant panic buying.
That's not happening at this moment because a lot of people have analysis paralysis (as evidenced by these types of threads). When it becomes clear to these people that they had better act now or forever be resigned to holding a smaller wallet than they had hoped, I have this feeling we're going to see some of the old bitcoin volatility (to the upside) return.
