For your edification.
This shows total BTC minted versus total $Volume on Gox. The pink marker is where the halving occurred.
Interesting
Interestingly the two notable increase also coincide with an exponential increase in difficulty.
Because improved mining tech suddenly allows miners to buy hardware which has lower marginal electricity cost and thus is very profitable to operate, miners start to rapidly push up difficulty and being hyper-bulls by nature they wish to keep as many as possible. Miners begin selling less coins into the exchanges which dries up supplies after about a month or two. As supply dries up price rises and it becomes a self perpetuating cycle as miners hoard even more coins during the bubble run up, media hype brings in new buyers as well. Eventually old coins are enticed to cash out and pop the bubble and or the supply of new buyers runs own.
2011 bubble was clearly driven by GPU adoption, this bubble seems to have been triggered by the block reward halving but their are certainly some ASIC technology elements at play as well. It may be that the first movement from $15 to $30 was the response to reward changes and everything after that was the ASIC bubble. It will be interesting to see what we get at the next reward halving, will price go through a gradual 2-3 month doubling (presumably staying stable after that) or will it be a wild double exponential bubble? I'm leaning towards the former, that block halving alone don't set off wild bubbles, only mining hardware dose that.
P.S. niko, the Gox trading volume has over the last few days become so anemic its practically equal the the entire daily coin creation, so again that production would be very significant if it were to reach the market. My prediction is that we will not find the stable price point until the daily mining output is being consistently liquidated and we find out how much the BTC community is willing and able to spend buying that daily production.
