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May 15, 2014, 11:28:04 PM |
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Lets take a miner with a single Antminer S1 - 180 Ghs who decides to continue mining even though its only $1 USD per BTC. Also keep in mind the price would probably decline to $1, not just go from $440 to $1 in one day and stay there forever.
Current Difficulty: 8,853,416,309 Current BTC per day: 0.01022 Current BTC USD$: 400 ( is more, but $400 for this exercise ) Income for this miner in USD$: $4.00
As other mining operations shutdown - go bust, the difficulty and network hashrates and difficulty would plummet at first, then taper off gradually dropping, but the BTC mined per day would react to the balance between the difficulty and may counter balance the drop in $$$ value.
So lets half the stats:
Difficulty: 4,426,708,154 BTC per day: 0.02044 BTC USD$: 200 Income for this miner in USD$: $4.00
Half it again: Difficulty: 2,213,354,077 BTC per day: 0.04088 BTC USD$: 100 Income for this miner in USD$: $4.00
This time, divide by 10 Difficulty: 221335407 BTC per day: 0.4088 BTC USD$: 10 Income for this miner in USD$: $4.00
And divide by 10 once more to get $1 Difficulty: 22,133,540 BTC per day: 4.088 BTC USD$: 1 Income for this miner in USD$: $4.00
The point for miners is, its not the value in $USD per BTC, but the mining hashrate to difficulty balance, that matters.
If for example this ficticious event happens at $1 where difficulty drops to a million: Difficulty: 1,000,000 BTC per day: 90.47 BTC USD$: 1 Income for this miner in USD$: $90.47
So you can see that as long as mining continued, blocks would continue to be discovered and at a faster rate but would be worth less in the conversion to cash. Transactions would still take place, although probably take longer to process. etc etc.
And as things go, if this last event did happen, miners who had exited the game would turn their miners back on again until the difficulty went up sufficient enough for them to be earning ( in the case of the Antminer S1 ), $4.00 a day again.
By no means a perfect example, but just a scenario and how it could pan out.
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