Quote from: ewitte on June 13, 2013, 03:42:57 PM

For now most ASIC companies only accept BTC. Now its nearly required to have ASIC to continue mining. For this alone I feel the price is about to skyrocket in BTC/$ ratio. A lot of peoples mining dropped so much they are going to be forced to buy (demand driving up) if they want ASIC.

There are some assumptions built into this analysis that may not hold up.

1) The assumption that the mining is done by ASIC
2) The assumption that there is not free power and free computers (or spare power / spare computers) doing mining.

It is entirely possible that some corporation that has a lot of computers connected and under utilized in facilities with already sunk costs for power, HVAC, real estate, connectivity may have just decided that they want to make use of their spare devices for a very small marginal cost start using them to mine bitcoin.

If this were true, this could have the effect of reducing the BTC/$ rather than raising it. This is because the mining could be done at such a low marginal cost that the cost per mined coin goes down rather than up. Further a corp might not need to show a quarterly profit and see that as more important than any long term hold opportunity and have the incentive to sell all mined coins as they are generated.
The secondary effect of this is that ASIC purchases would slow, because they are not as profitable as they once were.

That this may become a more common trend until the ASIC prices and demand falls to a more manageable level.
It would not be a bad thing for Bitcoin, and may even help to entrench it into the existing business environments if this practice continues.

If (for example) someone at IBM, ATT, or Google thought it might be a good idea to make use of their extra systems siting in data centers and rolled out mining installations to their computing centers globally, you could see a difficulty increase such as this in advance of new ASIC shipments.
Or consider that data center consolidation is an ongoing project, there could be a data center disconnection planned that is delayed for some reason, and enterprising engineers make use of that extra time to get some mining done.
There are many possibilities that exist outside the narrow assumptions that we make thinking that everyone is doing things just in the same way and under the same conditions as we may be doing them.

Think outside the box.
Cognitare Extra Buxum