Quote from: gmaxwell on August 30, 2013, 11:36:11 PM

Quote from: spiral_mind on August 30, 2013, 11:31:41 PM

Obviously it's not going to keep up forever. For the next half a year or so though? That certainly seems possible at least. There's an insane amount of network power that's already been pre-ordered and just needs to go into production already.

Trying to predict price from difficulty has failed for everyone historically no shocker because it makes no sense to do so. Difficulty has closed loop control from the system, it'll be whatever it needs to be to control the blockrate. When difficulty makes mining not profitable enough people stop mining and the difficulty drops. More than half the coin that will ever exist is already in circulation, miners are in little position to dictate market prices to improve their profitability, but in a lot of position to turn on and off.

Why would people who pre-ordered miners and waited months ever stop mining considering how quickly their device's lifetime coin generation will drop off as other's asics are delivered though? You can't ignore how massively oversold every company's pre-orders are. People with pre-ordered asics are much more likely to mine 24/7 without turning off no matter the price (they have to count on the price going back up to ever hope to have a return on investment now). We're not going to see a drop in difficulty until mining is totally dominated by the most efficient possible units.

My point for this post was simply that miners want to make a profit, and they will have to wait to sell until a certain price point to get one. Buying a miner is basically betting on a minimum price of Bitcoin in the future (since difficulty is all but guaranteed to go up for months due to the stack of pre-orders). If this decreases supply it's possible it will be balanced out by the increased supply from faster block confirmation though.