Anybody mining in the USA all of 2018 is at a real total loss on accounting. Most miners do not sell right away to fiat so you owe the IRS lots of money if you mined and hodled. Since the. Value of the coins dropped 6x on mining that means your 6x short on giving the irs their cut. Irs wants the value of the coins you mined that day. Your options is to buy 6x more coins to pay off the IRS or sell all your mined coins at a loss and clear out your accounting before end of year.
Congrats 2018 mining losers. You screwed yourself over
If they mine and sell is worse cause price will sway to crash due to that, if they hold they win in the long term but as you said the tax problem screw anybody over, only idiots sell at these prices, how these prices have become a reality is beyond me. I myself thought eth would never crash lower than 300 usd and i was wrong too on 2015 when btc crashed to $200. I thought $400 would hold, i guess while bulls are pumping coins, prices rise more than we can ever think about and when it crashes is the same thing.
I think the reason why ETH crashed so hard is due to the liquidations on that DAI Maker market. Basically <$150 or so, there were massive liquidations.
I remember reading about DAI back at the beginning of the year and people were basically buying BMWs on leverage pretty much because everyone assumed that ETH will keep increasing in value.
This is similiar to what happened to the subprime loan crisis in USA about a decade ago.