Yup, why not?   There are many home miners from the early ASIC days who turned off when the mega-miners came in, why wouldn't they want to stick it to the majority who took the fun out of the game.

No one has answered this.  The answer must be yes, it would be possible with a modified client. 
Another scenario comes up when you consider the shadow miners, all the at-home ASIC owners who turned off their machines as they lost out to the mega-miners.   They'd surely consider turning them back onto mining on the "losing" fork at reduced value, because the difficulty will drop dramatically as well.   Shadow miners are mostly from the idealistic phase of Bitcoin, so their incentive to continue on Core if XT wins out will be great.

Both forks continue, one will not die to zero.   One may become sub $1 again, but that's OK for some people.

Will we have to make impassioned pleas for these belevolent early hoarders to exchange some of their precious hoard with the common folk for "worthless" fiat currencies, or will they only take property such as real-estate?   Those early hoarders sure are nice people.  Without them, the Bitcoin economy couldn't function.

Or, is that the 1% in a fiat-based society?

LOL. Buy the f*cking dip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0akBdQa55b4

So everyone over night stops seeing a pretty thing as pretty? That would need a cultural revolution the world over   Few substances have the color of gold with tarnish-resistence.
https://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/golden_glow/

Gold's inate properties make it desirable amongst a periodic table of silvery and dull metal colored elements.   That perception of worth is very difficult to remove, unlike the perceived value of e.g. Tulip bulbs, where many people in the day were commenting "but why does it carry such worth when the Rose has much more beauty and variety?"

Or just trying to preserve any remaining value of their original investment, like a sane investor.

Or upon re-evaluation, come to the conclusion that the time horizon to profit comes with too much risk

This is a strawman argument. Compare OP to a new investor whose basis is now $227.   If the price goes to $1000, new investor now has more profit than the OP, whose only problem is having paid too much (basis cost too high).   Why did he pay too much - because of the drum beat of the hodlers (according to OP).
It's normal for OP to blame the drum-beat in this situation.  

On the way down, a person who bought at $1000 and sells at $200 loses less than a person who bought at $1000 and sells at $10 (e.g. at the point of complete market failure / loss of confidence).
Venture Capital companies do a lot of due dilligence when it comes to "throwing good money after bad",  why shouldn't OP?
By repeating the mantra that BTC is still in Beta / don't invest more than you can lose, the message is that everything to do with the price in fiat is a gamble.  
Is the BTC world a casino?

Chopperman was led to believe that the 10% finders fee from the IRS is 10% of any recovered tax payment that the IRS finds was unpaid, so not 10% of the total amount uncovered.

Otherwise, mazel tov!

Traced BFL related blockchain payments, a lot of speculation about this in the hardware thread.    It's way more than just the EMC cold wallet.  The "$1M pre-order" BTC hasn't even moved since that press release.

That's just the EMC cold wallet.

Estimates for BFL total wallets are 10,000 to 50,000 BTC.

Up until the judge ordered this, no one was expecting a forced sell event of any kind.    That it's going to be done orderly has no meaning.  Everyone will want to get their sell orders in first.

Judge in FTC versus BFL case orders all of their bitcoin to be converted to USD.
This is a black swan event - nobody saw it coming.
Nobody other than BFL knows how much BTC this is going to be, but it's all coming onto the market.
Nowhere to go but down.


http://ia902308.us.archive.org/32/items/gov.uscourts.mowd.117531/gov.uscourts.mowd.117531.54.0.pdf

---------------------------
All parties shall cooperate in transferring Receivership Defendant’s bitcoins to a Court controlled bitcoin wallet,

Conversion of Receivership Defendant’s substantial bitcoin holdings to cash on a systematic and reasoned basis;

So instead of the restaurant paying about 10c to process your credit card (and you getting about 1c in Credit Card points), you paid about 5c on top of the bill.  Via coinbase, they pay 0% fees to sell the BitCoin to them instantly for $$ (first $1M) 
No wonder businesses are interested, 0% chance of chargeback, and the customer pays the fees.     Unless the businesses gives you a discount for BitCoin purchases, it's not to your benefit though.

Agreed 100%. BFL is sitting on much "free" money from the first ASIC generation, it doesn't matter how bad they make the second gen, they still win with this business model.

And to think that Yifu decided to design the Avalon because he was worried that BFL represented a threat to the future of Bitcoin by monopolizing production of mining equipment. 
http://bitcoinmagazine.com/3203/avalon-ships-bitcoins-first-consumer-asics/

Note the fine print - refunds in currency or vouchers.    Chopperman foresees another shit coming when the refunds are only available as 50% usable currency and 50% worthless BFL money. Chopperman is guessing that it's 50% worth of hosted mining coupons.    How's that for a final dump on customers.

As noted in the BFL fucks us thread, the Lifeboat thingy website lists BFL Josh as a board member, so no surprise there.

There's a hidden variable here though.   If 1000 or 10000 people decide the same thing (purchase BTC direct rather than mine it), then the
additional purchase pressure makes the exchange rate less likely to go down. (and more likely, up)

The attractiveness of mining now is partly getting BTC from the pool of newly minted coin every day, rather than on an exchange, where
you are opening yourself up to unknown fraud potential, KYC rules, and possibly enriching an early adopter by purchasing their old coin,
or otherwise contributing to the demand side.   

The thing that baffles me though is that the upside is completely capped by the size of the initial investment.   Because of rising difficulty,
all mining investments become trickle income in a few months.   It's like congratulating yourself for buying a share in Apple at $100 (pre
split) and watching it grow to $700.    You only realize the $600 profit if you sell it, and you only have one to sell.   Once that's done, you're
out of the game.   People who purchased a miner and used it for a few months are partial BTC owners, they are not on the path to
the "new wealthy elite".    The logical thing at that point is to turn off that miner and move on.   It is not logical to decide that they need to
10x the size of their initial investment just to stay in the game.

Once the initial miners decide to get out, the hardware will go on the open market at blow out prices, there will be purchasers for those
who will make new ROI decisions on old hardware at trickle income rates. 

The BFL "charity" page at BidtoinDF.org shows:

571 coins donated
 408 coin remaining, and no outgoing donations listed since August 2013.

Blockchain shows the address as having received a total of 1503 coins, with a final balance of 408 coins.
Initial funding of the donation address shows 3 lots of about 500 coins each going in in June 2013, and one lot of about 500 coins going out to an address that hasn't been touched since. Probably a BFL account.

BFL started this with the 1000 coins they promised to charity (*1) because the 65nm products didn't meet original power expectations.

(*1) At the time, most people assumed they meant a real charity, BFL set up their own non-profit entity purely for the sake of receiving this 1000 coins.

One of the latest donations (December 31, was that a tax avoidance move?) is 25 coins to the lifeboat foundation, which basically plans to HODL coins for future value, and their grand plan of surviving the computer singularity.    List of board members includes Josh Zerlan, no surprise there.

Stinky stinky pseudo charity.

Direct question, do you consider yourself an ethical person?
Direct question, are there any unethical things you have done in conjunction with BFL?
Direct question, do you know of unethical things BFL is doing or has done without your help?
Direct question, do you know of unethical things BFL is planning on doing?
Direct question, do you have, and which are your sockpuppet accounts?
Direct question, do you know which are BFL and Josh's / Inaba's sockpuppet accounts?
Direct question, how do you feel working for the most incompetent hardware company in bitCoin world?
Direct question, are you just a simple employee of BFL, or is there some other arrangement (profit sharing/stock/part owner)?
Direct question, what was your motive in working for BFL?
Direct question, are you going to continue to work for BFL once your current task is done?
Direct question, is your Monarch refund being handled the same way as any other customer's would be?

Holy Sh*t.   Does that mean there are people who could have saved Coca Cola in bottles when they purchased them in the 50s and can now sell them for 4000% profit?  Where are these early adopter soft drink mavens?  They found the secret to beating inflation.

Inflation is certainly a problem, but comparing the last 50 years with the next is not meaningful economics.

Question: Did you decide to post about it on this forum from your own idea or did BFL ask you to post about it?? 
Chopperman wonders because BFL asked early 65nm customers to post when their order came, and many did.

Especially as the deployed boards are most likely 360GH (same as demonstrated) and the allocated GH is showing very close to 600GH with some variance.      The math don't add up unless all boards are underclocked to 300 GHash.

Someone should try pointing their units at another pool so the BFL pool software can't fudge the numbers.