The mining downward spiral FUD was predicted months ago

[cellard]

I've seen a lot of people, specially mainstream media, reporting on how Bitcoin would crash because the economic incentives would collapse if the price went way below the cost of opportunity to produce more bitcoin supply. Everytime the price has collapsed a lot we've seen these. Well this guy predicted it months ago:

Lowest hanging fruit for the next batch of unsubstantiated FUD will be the "mining death spiral" articles that appear every bear market and halving. "Once the price hits <insert random number> miners will turn off their equipment and bitcoin will die"

https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1006968132001517584

Then months later we have this:

https://coingape.com/bitcoin-price-predictions-got-wilder-predicts-bitcoin-will-die/

The FUD machine has begun to go at full steam with the doomsday predictions: bottom's close.

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[avikz]

"Mining death spiral" is not a myth. It can definitely strike if the price of bitcoin goes below the production cost. But it is also an infinite loop which never ends. Everytime a large potion of miners quit, the difficulty also goes down. It will again attract a new line of miners to join the mining spree which will increase the network hashrate and the difficulty again. If the price doesn't support the production cost at thus time, again a large number of miners will quit. You see it's a loop.

For the prediction, I don't have to say much because anyone can predict anything. I prefer to use my own judgement ability when it comes to trading and investing! Negative news only brings negativity into our life so it's better to stay away from these!

[Dimon8]

The price of electricity in different parts of the world is different, and therefore the cost of bitcoin mining is different. I think that the current Bitcoin collapse is a premeditated operation to eliminate competitors in the field of mining.
Perhaps soon there will be a monopolist on bitcoin mining.

[figmentofmyass]

I've seen a lot of people, specially mainstream media, reporting on how Bitcoin would crash because the economic incentives would collapse if the price went way below the cost of opportunity to produce more bitcoin supply. Everytime the price has collapsed a lot we've seen these. Well this guy predicted it months ago:

Lowest hanging fruit for the next batch of unsubstantiated FUD will be the "mining death spiral" articles that appear every bear market and halving. "Once the price hits <insert random number> miners will turn off their equipment and bitcoin will die"

https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1006968132001517584

Then months later we have this:

https://coingape.com/bitcoin-price-predictions-got-wilder-predicts-bitcoin-will-die/

The FUD machine has begun to go at full steam with the doomsday predictions: bottom's close.

it's a sign of fearful and almost capitulatory sentiment, indeed. i'm noticing that analysts and commentators are becoming quite bold with their bearish predictions lately, and also quite self-satisfied with their rationalizations about bitcoin's economic design.

they don't get it, of course. miners speculate on price just like investors and traders. they just do so indirectly by investing in hardware. so in a bear market, the miners get squeezed as well, just like other investors headed for capitulation.

the beauty of bitcoin mining (vs gold mining) is that difficulty will adjust to account for miners shutting down, keeping the network running smoothly. it's a beautiful thing, really.

[Buttermellow]

But, we could not expect people to believe on FUD because we had our own research also in bitcoin and mining. Even though I am not involve in mining but still it has the same concept on investing bitcoin where if you had already invested and market crash definitely leads to losses i.e. interest and money.

[jseverson]

“Unless Bitcoin is able to become more efficient at mining, and more stable overall, it is likely to die. These higher mining costs and the fact that more retailers are failing to accept bitcoin as payment – as they are unable to convert it as it is too expensive – will mean the end of it.”

Lol these people don't get it. Mining efficiency doesn't address this problem at all. It's only unprofitable until it isn't, which makes death by this avenue unlikely. I'm not counting on recovery anytime soon, but it's always funny watching people trying to trigger panic.

[wuvdoll]

It is only logical since there are more and more miners moving towards bitcoin cash as well.

It is not only about bitcoin price going down and some miners closing their shop, that is not the biggest problem bitcoin has because small miners were never interested in bitcoin anyway.

Nevertheless, the trouble is the biggest bitcoin miners are also people who are aiming at mining other stuff as well and during a time where mining really helped the bitmain dudes for bitcoin cash it was also the same time mining bitcoin cash was more profitable compared to bitcoin itself.

Hence, there was a lot of mining power moving towards bitcoin cash instead of bitcoin, hell the hash power even passed bitcoins hash power for a while. Basically all of this is caused by bitmain and that is not a big trouble considering they will come back eventually in near future once those forks got dumped and bitcoin will finds its way toward new peaks.

[cindygirl]

It doesn't take a genius to state that if the price drops below the mining cost then people will stop to mine. The same can be said for near anything. If the value of a car is under the production costs then companies will stop making them.

[Kemarit]

It doesn't take a genius to state that if the price drops below the mining cost then people will stop to mine. The same can be said for near anything. If the value of a car is under the production costs then companies will stop making them.

Yes, we don't need to be rocket scientist to see what will happened if the price went below cost to produce more bitcoin supply. I think the FUD started when mainstream media started to say that mining bitcoin causes to much energy etc, etc .. And when the Bitcoin Cash war started, everything started onto a downward spiral. Anyways, it doesn't mean death anyways, but it makes the recovery a little bit longer and that's what makes people very wary about the future of bitcoin.

[davis196]

The miners won't just wait for their business to be destroyed.They will do something about it. 
Anyway,let's look it on the bright side.If the mining difficulty will drop so much, bitcoin mining with PCs will become profitable again,I guess.

[cindygirl]

The miners won't just wait for their business to be destroyed.They will do something about it. 
Anyway,let's look it on the bright side.If the mining difficulty will drop so much, bitcoin mining with PCs will become profitable again,I guess.

I don't think that's going to happen unless the price goes so low that people with ASICs etc won't mine ever again. If price drops below the mining threshold we'll just see a difficulty adjustment and then all the miners will come back online again. Only way they never come back on is if the initial investment costs are so high relative to the profit they can make.

[kryptqnick]

I've seen a lot of people, specially mainstream media, reporting on how Bitcoin would crash because the economic incentives would collapse if the price went way below the cost of opportunity to produce more bitcoin supply. Everytime the price has collapsed a lot we've seen these. Well this guy predicted it months ago:

https://twitter.com/matt_odell/status/1006968132001517584

Then months later we have this:

https://coingape.com/bitcoin-price-predictions-got-wilder-predicts-bitcoin-will-die/

The FUD machine has begun to go at full steam with the doomsday predictions: bottom's close.

Okay, these people said bitcoin will go down, sure, but it they're also saying that it'll die. Bitcoin did not die and probably will not die. I also don't understand how you inferred that the bottom is close from some old negative price predictions. I do think it would be nice if somewhere around $3k was the absolute bottom, because it's kind of frustrating to see the prices going down fast and seriously.
I understand miners can be concerned because of the downward trend but even if they dump bitcoin, it really shouldn't have much impact, because the difficulty rate will adjust and some people will still mine the amount they have to mine. It's the FUD around it that makes people sell their btc.

[1Referee]

Anyways, it doesn't mean death anyways, but it makes the recovery a little bit longer and that's what makes people very wary about the future of bitcoin.

Actually, the current market sentiment makes a recovery occur much sooner, mainly because of the fact that the process of speculators and gamblers dumping their coins has been speeding up rapidly in the last couple of weeks. Imagine how long it would have taken if we kept hovering over $6000 and the aforementioned entities had their bags still fully loaded.

I would love OG's to reach a breaking point and start dumping as well. Instead of one person holding thousands of coins, these coins will be held by hundreds of people.

[pedangrusak]

I am a crypto user and lover, but logically if the cost of mining bitcoin is more expensive than the current coin price, then gradually they will leave mining, unless mining changes to a POS system, then there is no need for large infrastructure such as POW.

[cindygirl]

I would love OG's to reach a breaking point and start dumping as well. Instead of one person holding thousands of coins, these coins will be held by hundreds of people.

If only, these people will never dump their huge stacks, there just won't be any need. The price is so high that they can have anything they desire to buy with FIAT by just selling the smallest portion of their holdings. Unfortunately if bitcoin reaches its true potential we'll likely see a lot of generational wealth created as a result.

[Hydrogen]

The current bitcoin crash reminds me of 2013/2014 when chinese imposed restrictions and the closing of silk road conspired to crash bitcoin. I would be interested to know how heavily bitcoin mining is centralized within china and how vulnerable it is to chinese regulation strangling bitcoin miners in china as the crash may have occurred without significant cause. Anyways sorry guys I have no real insight into this. The US stock market is also crashing which could suggest that both are related and produced by analysts projecting a holiday retail season that falls short of expectations.

Amazon's earnings and revenues reported for 3rd quarter 2018 would seem to suggest weaker than expected consumer spending(as did other retailers iirc). That could translate to decreased utilization of payment exchange like bitcoin, suggesting declining transaction volume which led to the recent downturn.

If this is anything like the 2013/2014 bitcoin collapse, we may see a resurgence later on with greater all time highs.

It is possible, btc's latest downturn could also represent a correction in terms of mining difficulty resembling a bubble although I don't know enough to offer intelligent commentary on that.

[dothebeats]

This is no extravagant prediction IMO as this was bound to happen. Price goes down sharply = miners would sell off their machines and wait for another good run. Everyone seemed to overshoot their expectations on bitcoin, and due to that failure to recognize that bitcoin already lost steam once it reavhed $19k, everyone still thought that it'll push, and ended up investing more.

2018 is like a shit show for all investment-related subjects, and bitcoin isn't alone on the ordeal. Even stocks and other properties have taken a beating, resulting to losses for investors.

[CarnagexD]

This is no extravagant prediction IMO as this was bound to happen. Price goes down sharply = miners would sell off their machines and wait for another good run. Everyone seemed to overshoot their expectations on bitcoin, and due to that failure to recognize that bitcoin already lost steam once it reavhed $19k, everyone still thought that it'll push, and ended up investing more.

2018 is like a shit show for all investment-related subjects, and bitcoin isn't alone on the ordeal. Even stocks and other properties have taken a beating, resulting to losses for investors.

 With the recent crypto currency down stream trends, affect a lot specially the supposed miners of Bitcoin. There are report that because of the huge drops on the crypto market some are reported closing up, Downsize the manpower to the minimum, does create fear as posted on the market that would result to further downfalls of its production cost of Bitcoin. This was all over the news confirming some crypto expert prediction about the Bitcoin Mining Scenario.

[Harlot]

I think that the level of mining difficulty decreasing helps the current situation. With a more easier difficulty in mining Bitcoin it could potentially attract back the miners who shut their operations down as well as new miners to entering the mining industry. Not to mention GPUs are also going down in terms of price because of the demand decreasing as well as the new RTX line is available. Bitcoin won't die that easily as no one who wants to earn money will let their cash cow go to dust.

[figmentofmyass]

The current bitcoin crash reminds me of 2013/2014 when chinese imposed restrictions and the closing of silk road conspired to crash bitcoin. I would be interested to know how heavily bitcoin mining is centralized within china and how vulnerable it is to chinese regulation strangling bitcoin miners in china as the crash may have occurred without significant cause. Anyways sorry guys I have no real insight into this. The US stock market is also crashing which could suggest that both are related and produced by analysts projecting a holiday retail season that falls short of expectations.

i wouldn't say the stock market is crashing yet. it's teetering on the edge though, and i think that fearful sentiment in the markets carries over to bitcoin as well.

Amazon's earnings and revenues reported for 3rd quarter 2018 would seem to suggest weaker than expected consumer spending(as did other retailers iirc). That could translate to decreased utilization of payment exchange like bitcoin, suggesting declining transaction volume which led to the recent downturn.

transaction volume has been steadily rising since april, including the third quarter, so i don't think it's related. i think confirmed transaction volume has only been recently declining (since mid-november) because block generation time has been increasing since then. this is expected because of the hash rate drops.

It is possible, btc's latest downturn could also represent a correction in terms of mining difficulty resembling a bubble although I don't know enough to offer intelligent commentary on that.

that's exactly what's happening IMO. miners get drawn into speculative bubbles too.