If the price crashes too far, everyone will turn off their stuff and the diff will go way down for the few of us still mining out of principle. That might actually be nice, if only briefly.
False.
Just look at deepbit. Only getwork, no stratum. They were 3-4TH max back in the day, and 1.2TH now. Pretty much a dead pool but people are still on there with GPUs I guess mining at a loss??? I don't think we will see any negative sustained growth for quite a while, if ever.
Like people say, if you get "free" electricity i.e. steal it from your parents or boss, you can't really mine at a loss, not until your graphics card blows up anyway, and then you do just stop. I don't think many people mine out of principle, just some are still getting "something for nothing"
I would think by the time it is not worth keeping you rig on when you turn it off now one will notice difficulty wise. Can someone point to the big drop when cpu miners stopped. Then the big diff drop when gpu miners went to alt coins. Soon it will be show me the drop when sub 1th unites were turned off. You wont even notice just like cpu and gpu now one even noticed.
