Quote from: jjdub7 on August 02, 2014, 01:17:26 PM

Quote from: junkonator on August 02, 2014, 11:40:45 AM

Quote from: jjdub7 on August 02, 2014, 08:41:04 AM

Hasn't it been established that the major mining operators are colluding now to create a shortage in the supply? Ghash has been producing significantly less blocks over the past weeks - at one point they fell below Discus Fish in the 24 hour numbers.

Huh? Where can I read up on this?

No, sorry, not operators - I meant hardware manufacturers (but mechanically, its the same). Just because friedcat, for example, has 20PH worth of chips assembled in miners doesn't mean he's going to dump ASICminer's whole inventory on the market at once. He's going to price-discriminate, pricing AM hardware by customer segment, quantity ordered, location, etc. Like any good CEO, he's using the pricing strategy to both maximize his profits by getting the people willing to pay the most first (same as Bitmain's batched, price-tiered S3 release) and by restricting the added supply of bitcoins flowing onto the market from the additional hardware (thereby making the hardware itself more valuable, as the bitcoin it can mine stays at a higher value).

It helps to think of buying mining equipment as buying bitcoin futures realized as coupon payments from your mining pool.

http://www.coindesk.com/private-china-meeting-bitcoin-mining-industry-leaders/

Although my point about Ghash remains - they did have a massive decrease in blocks for the first half of the period (hardware maintenance/upgrade?).

Granted, when a new generation/smaller process node hitting the market will blow out the difficulty regardless in most cases. Imagine if all the major manufacturers announced they were releasing 14nm chips in December...the B.MINE price wouldn't drop so much as shift downwards.