what makes me interested in this news is the statement that "Just circa half a million coins (about $ 5 billion) are now left to be mined until next year when the block rewards are halved to ₿6.25 from the current ₿12.5" the statement made me asking "is mining next to bitcoin still existing (effective)? or will people start leaving to mine bitcoin?"
What do you think? are your thoughts the same as mine?
This is not news. This is by design.
As long as mining produces more money than it consumes (whether from block reward, whether from tx fees), as long as mining is even slightly profitable, mining will go on.
As you can see, mining can be profitable even with lower (and hopefully even 0, some day) block reward.
If you check the charts, the difficulty is still rising, meaning that new miners come in.
If mining will become less profitable, some miners will leave, making the difficulty drop and giving more profit to the ones remaining. A self-adjusting system.
The price.. is another story. As long as people are willing to sell this cheap, price stays as it is. Quite a lot of speculation makes the price not reflect the real "value". And the miners... I guess that they count the things in Bitcoins/kWh (after the gear is paid off), which doesn't really change by the percents mined, it'll change only at halving.
All in all, this "new" 85% means absolutely nothing spectacular.
