This is weird: when you mine a crypto you basically won't sell it under a certain price, no matter what. For some it's the electricity+mining cost price, for others just the idea of a price, and for some others an evil scheme etc.
But when price drops spectacularly like what we see right now, most miners desert the battlefield leaving only small & determined miners digging the trenches and mining at will with reduced difficulty. This is what is interesting by those times. Hashing power dropping because prices drop and therefore more coins for the remaining miner. This shows why most miners are in: instant profits. We can really get a measure of the finality of the mining process in those times, i.e.: the %age of miners leaving the game are the dumpers.
Therefore these dumpers leaving the game lead to a further stopping of the decline, and this is a self equilibrating situation.
Should price go up again big miners & dumpers flock again, then mining during crises would prove an excellent strategy because it gives small miners the lion's share in crucial times as well as more determination in holding their hardly earned coins, therefore negating whatever big miners can come up with when competition really hurts. The begining of a coin should always happen with expansion-retraction cycles to solidify the base. This illustrates that the value of a scarce resource is also defined by the stocks and the willingness to sell at a given price.
I wish more miners leave the scene and go away mining the DOGE farce or fight a desperate war against asics on LTC before coming back once prices take off again. They would have rendered a nice service to small holders that will constitute the base of the holders, and later whales. Because you don't sell something for no profit.
IMHO your premise about miners is flawed. I move around and mine the most profitable coin at any given time. I sell some of each coin to offset the electricity costs + $100USD and hold the rest. That way I have backup funds to replace equipment as needed and a stash of many coins to sell/buy as I see fit. I never "dump". This whole mining craze has driven many to spend thousands on equipment they can't really afford because they think this is a get rich scheme. When that doesn't happen they panic sell everything. They really have no idea what they're doing or understand about trading fundamentals or how to read charts. The markets will eventually settle out and the knee jerk miners will fall by the wayside. What's happening now reminds me very much of the US NASDAQ market tech bubble of the 90s. Only time will tell.
As for asics, they will be a game changer but not necessarily a good one. What I see is them mining the lesser coins and dumping them until each one is dead to pay for the outrageous prices being charged for asic miners. The remaining coins (LTC and a few others) will see their difficulties skyrocket and leave the asics with the same problem that happened to BTC. The mega hashers with deep pockets will drive the smaller players out of the plain scrypt market. They'll be left holding miners that will be pretty much worthless or sold at a huge loss to the mega hashers because they can't be used for anything else. In the mean time there will more asic resistant coins for the GPU miners and I doubt the asic companies will be able to make a different miner for every different coin. All that being said I see scrypt asics as only a fad with a niche market. JMHO.
Very interesting point: so the commoditization of mining (=ASIC-ness of a given coin) leads to consolidation of players, therefore making the coin ready for either a corporate or a even a governmental takeover, which will forcibly lead to the 51% attack in all probabilities.
It will be interesting to follow the development of both BTC and LTC mining markets to see what will be the practical consequences of this.
My impression will be that rather than ruining the coins this will make them reach a certain maturity that will lead to greater adoption by businesses and institutions, thereby making them de facto and de jure "legit".
Then, once a minimal set of coins has reached maturity, what will be the need for the others? -Most likely zero. Exchanges will therefore pump all of the wealth of the other coins to the emperors of coins, by means of pegging.
But the interesting point will come once every coin has been mined, because then these expensive ASIC miners will be used only for minting, meaning their numbers can then be reduced and electricity bills as well. But one should consider a yearly rate of coins loss resulting in a rarefaction of the resource which will then be reserved for "important uses" like governmental uses as well as transaction of smaller and smaller fractions because of the deflation.
The question then will be: will the strategy of the biggest players be like gold: storing it to back their other cryptos? -If so, will there be confiscation of these coins once they reach maturity to act as reserve currencies?
And then the corollary: what will the small people use then? -How to determine its legality (hint: exchanges)?
My guess: there will always be room for an alternative crypto, because SR sequels are here to stay and will strive on it.
Another interesting read. A hard fork to circumvent scrypt asics may be another blow to their long term viability.