a reduction in remuneration or an increase in difficulty is always offset by an increase in the exchange rate
I don't agree... Last few months we saw Ethereum difficulty increasing while the price was decreasing. I guess it's because new miners were starting with mining ETH and didn't care that the daily profit was decreasing. Only few days ago, when the ETH price was so low and difficulty so high that mining became unprofitable for a lot of miners, we saw difficulty decreasing.
I guess the team behind Ethereum decided to decrease the mining reward to fight inflation. I guess they realized that there is too much new ETH on the market every day. This way (in theory) the price should rise 33% because the reward will be decreased by 33%. But I'm sure the rise in price won't be that big.
The difficulty did go down but not a whole lot. Basically back to the April 2018 levels and in the grande scheme of things it's very little and hardly made mining any more profitable.
Don't think it will cause the price to go up however. ETH had plenty of good news like the ETH futures trading and the price went down also.
The issue is the cashing out of ICOs and the fearful selling of the holders who bought at $1000 earlier this year.
There are also the scalable issues that the network is having. It gets clogged from time to time and it's full database is becoming way too large for the average computer user to run a node.
