I expect the "reward halving" to have a significant, negative impact on large mining operations. Another way to phrase this is "income halving" (in terms of bitcoins). Virtually everything that goes into a mining operation is priced in fiat (USD for me). That means electricity, hardware, staff salaries, cooling and so forth. Unless bitcoin doubles in value, a large operation will likely lose half it's "income", and have zero reduction in it's cost of operation. Show that to any large industrial operation (e.g. auto manufacturer), and they will all say it's time to do something drastic (e.g. close plants, lay off folks, etc).
I don't see how a large bitcoin mining operation can avoid this, unless they start to "wind down" in some way prior to "reward halving".
I don't see how a large bitcoin mining operation can avoid this, unless they start to "wind down" in some way prior to "reward halving".
it would be beautiful to see the global harshrate plummet and difficulty along with it.
Or price to rise.
When you have a lot of GHS it is always great to see the difficulty going down
no no, price needs to drop. If the price rises more big investors will see it as profitable to set up large mining operations with high end equipment that will just push the at-home mining further out of the picture.
Now if the price dropped to $150 today we'd see a few PHs worth of machines shut down tomorrow. Then the difficulty would drop and someone with 2 antminer S1s in their closet will finally have a reason to turn them back on