Guys bitcoin will only fall for now and will rise once a Quantum Computer is created. Half of quantum computer problems have been solved so now its few years from now. The day this Computer comes in market the difficulty will rise like rocket and price will goto 100K$
I have no idea how quantum computing will change bitcoin mining, but I don't think there is a close relation between difficulty and price.
For example, the difficulty is now 15x higher than last Dec, but the current bitcoin price is just half of the price back then.
Actually, I do see one small data point where the difficulty and the price of bitcoin is related...
Maybe there's an answer, but I haven't found anything that sounds correct.
As we know the difficulty is always rising, and at a good clip.
Well, we've gone from the point where you could (reasonably) mine with your computer, to mining with graphics cards, to dedicated add-in boards, to full-blown stand-alone ASIC miners. And the technology has moved surprisingly quickly from the old 130 nm process to what is essentially the state-of-the-art 28 nm process, so from that standpoint, we're close to tapped out.
Well, after everybody is on only the latest and greatest hardware and the difficulty jumps once more to the point where the hobbyist can't afford to hang w/ the huge data-center-based farms. And then, soon after, it starts drying up for them (after some consolidation, I imagine), who is going to be willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars a month on mining operations when it's simply not profitable to do so?
And if no one is mining, (because it's insanely expensive), how does bitcoin continue to function?
Any ideas?
Anyway, I don't want to hijack this guy's thread... but I want to add that I think it will head there again, in the fairly near future.