Yeah, the price of Bitcoins has to fall to around $260-$280 due the maths in the macro economics involved in the older generations of crypto currencies.
Essentially, the currency has to many miners who are not investors or backer of crypto currencies, but these people are purely interested selling of their Bitcoins for Fiat currency e.g. Dollars, Pounds, Euros, etc. Therefore, they are simply mining to sell off their Bitcoins or whatever crypto currency and cash out into Fiat Currency.
Currently, what has been attempted has been to increase the mining difficulty to offset boom in demand for Bitcoins (boom is when prices go unrealistic levels in a short-term period compared to the long-term). The better policy would have been, the biggest holders of Bitcoin releasing some of their stockpiles to prevent the original booms in Bitcoins prices and buying Bitcoins back in slumps. For example: 30% of all the Bitcoins are owned by about 10 people, the entire price difference between a price of $276 per Bitcoin and $360 in $1 million dollar or 0.026% of the current market capitalization. Therefore, it should be impossible to have a boom in the Bitcoin price unless the people with the big holdings are not following macro economic rules.
The policy of pushing up the mining difficulty to maintain an unrealistic prices has caused a knock on reduction in miners willing to hold their Bitcoins for 2-100 years, this is because they need increase their hashing power to maintain their yields, which means a bigger demand for mining equipment (and cloud mining) purchases, which equates to more miners needing to sell Bitcoins or providers needing to sell Bitcoins for Fiat currency.
Alternatively, if the biggest holders had managed the price downwards it would have choked off Fiat Currency Profiteers entering the crypto currency market place in the 1st place.
A simple equation: the price profitability of being a miner should be below the value of doing extra hours of overtime in paid employments= choking out Fiat Currency Profiteers.
The other equation that matters is: each day the amount of people seeking to cash out into Fiat currency must equal the number of people seeking to buy in with Fiat currency, the price will go up or down according to imbalances in this equilibrium.
For example: Bitcoin S5 is $413. A Quality PSU is $160, a Raspberry PI is $56 and Postage is $30= $659.
In the USA (Current price of $278), with 50% jump in difficulty over 1 year results in profit a $678.5. If the person spends 1 hour each week on maintenance and research, this equals a wage of $13 per hour. Many people will reckon 1 hour of overtime in the office or in a factory would be easier then messing about with electronics?
However, this equation has been completely ridiculous when the price of Bitcoin was $800, per each hour invested by miner they made $56. Obviously, this was always going to attract Fiat Currency Profiteers!
Turning to hacking or theft of Bitcoins from major companies like MT.Gox. This has clearly, shaken the less informed investors interested in Bitcoin and other crypto currencies.
The design of Crypto Currency has a theoretical possibility of being a platform for zero theft existence for businesses and large investors.
The Bitcoin organisation or the original designers simply didn't see how close their crypto currency was to zero theft existence for businesses and private investors.
Essentially, the Bitcoin or new crypto-currency would set up a premium services for businesses to lock their wallet across the peer-to-peer network, up to 50-100% volume could be locked down according to operational needs. Therefore, not only would a hacker have to steal the wallet, break the encryption, but also contact the Organisation to move coins of that wallet in large volumes, consequently contacting Bitcoin would reveal their identity!
Secondly, looking at the owner of Mintpal stealing depositors Bitcoins, these Bitcoins ended up on in his wallet. As a peer to peer currency, people will publicly know or be able to trace his wallet with the stolen Bitcoins on and other people should be able to lock his wallet on the network through 40%-50% vote in favour. Therefore, making it impossible to to profit from the theft of that crypto currency. Peer to peer wallets for crypto currencies should have voting functions (like internet jury) to lock wallet of a person accused of stealing coins on the network.
At the end of day, most miners or cloud miners of Bitcoin would prefer lower Fiat prices for Bitcoins or Litecoins then turbo charged increases in mining difficulty, because if you plan to hold the currency for 2 years or more (1 year 8 month to next block halving) then a greater volume of Bitcoin on past expenditures is better each day then a higher Fiat currency price.
WOW this is alot of reading i about finished a cup of coffee reading this lol. I must say i am really proud of a new account that writes this kind of stuff. Alot of the new accounts i see just go on to complain and hide haha. In any case i agree with alot of the points you have made note of on here.