Quote from: Chronikka on March 24, 2016, 06:43:02 PM

Quote from: tmfp on March 24, 2016, 06:17:49 PM

All this is pure speculation of course, it's just that basing any theory about price on an unproven assumption about the Chinese is dangerous and misleading.

Originally I made no distinction about whether the miners were located in China or not. The point was that all major mining operations have to sell BTC for fiat at some point. Whether that's a day or a month after a block is mined doesn't really matter. Less BTC to sell means less downward pressure on the market. All other costs remain the same. The cost to produce ASICs isn't halving, nor is the cost to produce an actual miner. For a major mining operation that's the real cost anyways, not electricity or warehouse space. But even those smaller items are not negligible, and they're not being halved either.

I'm not saying the price is guaranteed to rise. There could be any number of things that cause it to fall that are totally unrelated to the halving. But when it does happen the amount of BTC being sold on the markets by miners will absolutely decrease. How much and what sort of long term impact will that have on the price? I have no idea. But its entirely reasonable to think the price will rise and allow less efficient miners to continue making a profit, even if its a small amount or for a short period of time.

I only can say how it was done with Asicminer when they were bringing out their first working ASIC. They became a big part of the networks hashrate and they did keep their bitcoin and only exchanged coins to fiat when they needed to pay something in fiat. For example development cost for the next asic generation, workers salary and so on.

Ok, it might be that the situation is a bit different now. The bitcoin price can drop anytime so it might be that miners exchange bigger amount, maybe half of the mined amounts in fiat just to secure some value. At least you should see miners as bitcoin fans for the most part since bitcoin is the future they build on. Even on a pure business perspective.