Quote from: TPTB_need_war on April 21, 2016, 01:26:25 AM

Quote from: r0ach on April 21, 2016, 12:34:40 AM

Anonymint, I don't know how you can fall into the beginner trap of saying the halving is "priced in". For something to be priced in, it would imply there is some form of equilibrium at hand, meaning the price goes up, minining power doesn't increase with it, halving occurs, then mining power stays the same. That isn't what happened at all though. The price went up and more mining power joined the network, raising the price floor months ago and it has been shown to be pretty stable at the higher price. Now when the halving occurs, the price is either required to increase a lot, or lots of miners will have to drop out. There is no form of equilibrium at hand. Tidal waves of cause and effect have to occur.

We also know that ASICs require lots of R&D investment and capital. Since people have already invested millions of dollars in mining farms, there is no way in hell they are going to turn off their 16nm, state of the art miners. Current process node miners simply do not turn them off ever. They always mine at a loss or buy coins off the wall to dollar cost average before doing that. Even if you did think the Bitcoin price was unsustainable (it's not, market cap is still small), it's inevitable the price would spike higher before any unsustainable reality could set in.

The act of mining is also a decentralized exchange while Coinbase is a centralized exchange. Supply is being cut in half on the DEX while demand remains the same because miners are simply not going to be turned off. Centralized exchanges are forced to follow the price action.

1. Marginal miners continuing to mine has no positive effect on the price. If hashrate doesn't halve, they have to sell proportionally (to the block reward) more Bitcoin to pay expenses. So while the main argument for the price increasing (other than expectations of investors), is the halving of the annual supply of coins will be available for selling from mining, some of that could be offset by increased selling as more marginal miners become cash flow negative. So the initial effect could be an increase in selling while marginal miners try to stay afloat hoping price will rise. This is entire consistent with the V crash followed by a slingshot rocket up, which is what I stated is possible.

2. Marginal miners won't shut off their mining once Bitcoin becomes unprofitable for them, instead they will shift their ASICs to Bitcoin clones. Another Litecoin (formerly the GPU switch) is out there right now, waiting to be beneficially. Is it Vcash? What Bitcoin clones are out there?

3. I don't think the DEX demand via mining is entirely price inelastic. At some price, it is more profitable to mine an altcoin, then trade it for Bitcoins (after pumping the price of the altcoin by mining out the float and doing manipulation).

The game theory is much more sophisticated than your simplistic one.

Quote from: TPTB_need_war on April 21, 2016, 01:53:31 AM

There was a -40% price crash of Bitcoin about 3 months before the last halving, so that would correspond to roughly this May:

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/bitstampUSD#rg1460zczsg2012-04-23zeg2013-01-22ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply#Projected_Bitcoins_Short_Term

Also the price rise in 2013 followed not only the halving but also the first ASIC miners:

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/40944/when-did-the-asic-mining-era-begin

So another possible theory is the ASIC miners had such lower costs, that more and more Bitcoin was being held and not sold to pay expenses. And thus leading to the 2013 bubbles.

Whereas, the opposite economics this halving, in that more miners will have their costs increase unless the price doubles, thus more Bitcoin proportionally being dumped on the market until those marginal miners exit and go mine an altcoin.