The problem is that the coin cant survive without miners. No miners, no transactions. That is unlike realworld currencies or things like gold for example. When mining gold becomes to difficult or not profitable any more, miners will just stop and find another profession. Trading gold will still continue and due to scarcity gold prices will go up.
With crypto mining however, if all miners stop mining because its not profitable anymore, all transactions will stop, the community loses interest and the coin is doomed.
So imo, fix the difficulty first, and then the community with its miners will pick up the coin again, trading will start to increase and prices will rise.
Now im not saying the difficulty should be made too easy, because that could drop prices yes. But there is a reason why there is a certain target for difficulty and blocktime. Thats because it creates a balance. Not only within the coin itself, but also in relation to other coins. So when you have a difficulty that is about 20x higher than what it should be, you have severe imbalance.
Im actually surprised there are still people mining dbix. But maybe they have very cheap electricity? For me its cheaper to buy the coin than it is to mine the coin with the electric costs involved.
But, there is nothing wrong with the difficulty. If we look at Ethereum statistics at February 17 2017, you get similar difficulty and priced around $12.
Dbix actually follows ethereum evolution quite closely, albeit in different timescale.
The difference is, now dbix has to compete with the more profitable ethereum. Ethereum didnt have such competition in profit back then.
If we calculate profitability with this simple formula:
$/day = (Price/difficulty in TH) * hashrate in mh * 0.5184
then substract that with electricity costs, dbix is actually almost as profitable as mining ethereum in february 17.
Just not as profitable as ethereum -right now-.
There are several things that can be done to get out of this stagflation crisis:
1. Developer should do an ICO, therefore more "buy in" Txs.
Real world analogy: Increase FDI
Ethereum did this once. i dont understand why dbix wont do an ICO.
2. Developer should register dbix to more exchanges.
Real world analogy: facilitate trades.
I can see profitable use cases for dbix. One example i have talked about is for indonesian workers in arab to send money back home (remittance).
It's a $7billion/year market, currently paying transaction costs of 7%.
Cryptocurrency can reduce that to around 2%, thats $140M/year of block rewards and profit to miners and exchanges.
dbix is especially well positioned for that.
Heck i am willing to help if the developers can to come to jakarta to talk about this, and help to connect them to local exchange.
3. The easiest, central banking way: developers just buy back dbix thus depleting their seed money, while creating hype.
This is almost keynesian. But doomed to fail if they dont have more investors.
Modifying difficulty can also be done, but they should be very careful about it. Real world analogy to this, is akin to lowering central bank rate to unsustainable level.
From the Macroeconomics PoV, it only fixes the problem in short term and risks hyperinflation in long term.
EDIT: corrections on numbers. i was converting back and forth from idr to usd. pardon the mistakes.
