Its because you are loosing miners left and right. No miners means no transactions processed, at a difficulty of over 46 billion, and a value of only 200 to 230 bucks, its just not profitable to mine bitcoin. All your small miners you guys think are worthless are now mining other coins and flipping them for bigger profits, all the big mining compuonds are bogged down with huge difficulties. This is because the big compounds have no idea what they are doing as far as securing the network, all they care about is making X amount of dollars for solving X amount of blocks so they can pay the electric and have enough left over to fuel their yacht.

The small miners are needed a lot more than this community would liek to give them credit for actually, at this point with sometimes 2 hour confirms on bitcoin transaction the bottom line is, you need more computing power, and its just not worth it to mine Bitcoins right now.