Quote from: firefop on April 29, 2013, 02:09:58 AM

Personally I don't agree. I think BFL should intentionally flood the market with hundreds of units a day for some period of time, at least long enough to catch up on pre-orders. Sure it might crash the exchange rate, but most miners aren't going to be profit taking immediately after they get their rigs up and running... they'll do what they always do, quietly accumulate bitcoins, selling off barely enough to offset power costs and wait for a nice bubble to sell into. After the last speculative bubble I'm not too worried about the price dropping to single digits, there's enough support to keep it 'high enough' and avalon has already increased the hash-rate to the point that we'd probably only see one quick difficulty adjustment instead of the the 3 that were originally projected. and extra 3600 hundred coins for a couple days... not much at all really.

How exactly could it crash the exchange rate? There are only 3600 coins generated per day (not 3600 hundred which would be 3,600,000.) 25 every 10 minutes. That's not a constant I know but an average based on the difficulty - which is only adjusted every 2016 blocks. NOT every 2 weeks. So if the hash rate were to DOUBLE in one day due to a huge influx of new BFL boxes.. all those blocks would be found much faster.. theoretically twice as fast.. but still there wouldn't be any EXTRA coins out there. The difficulty would just raise after about a week instead of 2 weeks.

How would that crash the exchange?

If anything.. the exchange rate baseline should raise with the difficulty. Because new coins generated now require more work and more power. If the value of coins doesn't raise considerably after the insurgence of BFL boxes, it would no longer be profitable to mine. When miners can't break even because the difficulty is so high that a $2500 50GHs miner doesn't produce enough coinage - they'll stop mining. Why power a rig that isn't producing enough coins to pay the electric bill. Why purchase a $2500 miner if there's no way to recoup the cost of the miner?

So therefore the coins that those miners do produce they will not sell for less than enough to pay for their troubles. This changes the supply and demand ratio. As new people become interested in BTC, want to use it for commerce, want to buy it and invest in it, the more BTC we need in circulation to support that demand. So that would theoretically drive up the price - or cause the need to move a decimal point. Maybe we no longer care how much 1 BTC trades for but what .01 BTC trades for. But the raise in demand for new BTC in circulation is supposed to be supplied by miners. So the value has to go up with the difficulty. Not necessarily a 1:1 relationship, but there is a practical relationship between the two.