Quote from: Le Happy Merchant on August 26, 2013, 03:45:13 AM

Quote from: spiral_mind on August 26, 2013, 12:59:30 AM

Potential ending of quantitative easing by the federal reserve

Likely effect on price:down

I feel that when QE cuts out an economic shitstorm of extreme proportions will reach land. In short, I disagree with your conclusion.

I wouldn't assume that people would decide to buy bitcoin in an "economic shitstorm". That's different from a weak/strong dollar. You see it on this forum all the time: people saying "only invest what you can afford to lose". That's good advice since its very hard to actually spend Bitcoin at the moment on everyday living expenses. It seems likely that an "economic shitstorm" would actually make most people hesitant to invest in Bitcoin since they have less money they could lose comfortably.

Quote

* Demand for bitcoin might rise, because the rising difficulty will cause lots of investors to put more money in exchange instead of mining rigs. At 30% jump per each difficulty change, it is much cheaper to buy coins directly (Currently 3 coins cost only $360, while $360 mining rigs won't mine 3 coins during its whole life span, even start to run today)

This is actually a great point. Thanks for that. Does anyone know the total amount invested in ASICS? It'd be hard to gauge the amount of new investors that buy mining equipment but the amount spent on ASICS should be fairly easily quantifiable.

Quote

* Supply for bitcoin might drop due to less and less bitcoin income per miner (mass distribution of ASIC devices). If there are 360 miners each mining 10 coins per day, and each of them will sell 5 coins per day, that will be 1800 coins for sell. But if there are 36000 miners each mining 0.1 coin per day, most likely they will hold the coins, instead of selling 0.05 coins per day

That's certainly possible but the majority of network speed was sold to big orders (look at the orderbook distribution on bfl.ptz.ro for example). These are people who are investing and want to make a return on their investment. That requires selling coins. Hopefully people with that much money to spend can afford to hold their Bitcoins for a while and don't have to sell to pay their electricity. But BFL has delayed over a year for lots of early orderers who thought they would be getting a money printing machine and become filthy rich long long ago.