Curious what the community thinks:
Miners seem to be losing lots of money in Bitcoin right now due to expenses exceeding price. As a result, miners are leaving BTC as it is not profitable, which could then cause a deeper decline in BTC price. Has anyone else heard the same?
YC
I was having this discussion with a friend today. We were thinking that as more and more places accept bitcoin it will drive the price down since most of BTC that is used for that type of transaction has been from miners not people buying BTC to then buy something. When a big online store accepts bitcoin, for the most part they are just accepting the btc, selling the btc for fiat and further driving the price down. Just our thoughts
So this is a hard question as there are many causal reasons for price to go up and down, on these forums many thoughts have been put forth. What is even harder to understand, and rarely discussed, is the difference in time associated with each of these effects. So if one believes that more retailers converting Bitcoin to Fiat results in price deprecation the question is what is the time and rate of this depression in cost. Certainly the time for this decrease in price will be different (faster or slower) than the price change from people ceasing to mine. Less miners might result in fear about Bitcoin which could drive the price down. However, if those miners who drop out are the same miners who were just converting to Fiat immediately this will actually remove selling pressure leading to a rise in the price of Bitcoin. Again the hard part here is in understanding the strength and time delay associated with this activity. A real economist would create a system dynamics model to simulate these linkages. What makes it even harder is that this is really the first major cycle for crypto currency so we have no other proxy models to base analysis upon. Remember Bitcoin technology doesn't need peta-hash+ level capability to operate that was only a second order consequence of the arms race caused by people wanting Bitcoin.
In the short term I think price direction will be more heavily influenced by what ever factor will happen fastest; likely this is neither adoption by companies nor erosion of faith from a decrease in hash-power. Those two factors probably operate on a time-frame of 6 months to maybe even a year. So we need to identify a factor that operates in a time frame of ~3 months to understand the near term factors which most heavily influence BTC. ( I think day trading and bots at this point are likely draining on the price on the same order as miners are dumping). From a psychological perspective we must consider the endowment effect were a person will neither sell at a level nor is willing to acquire more. At $260-$280 I will not buy any bit coin nor will I sell the once I have.
In one re-guard BTC is a victim of its own success, it hitting a large market cap in beta makes it hard to incorporate new ideas as a failure would destabilize a multi-billion dollar industry. Altcoins such as DGB can push with much less fear, consider the 2 hardforks on this coin, that would be much harder for BTC at this point. However, this enables substantial improvement and testing. Most alt-coins have been scams or poor clones offering nothing, however, some good ideas have emerged and they have pushed forward crypto. The fate of BTC in my mind will be in its ability to reap the best ideas developed in the crypto world over then coming years. If they can reap the best ideas and incorporate them either directly or as add on then it will continue to grow as it provides more value to a large base. If it fails other coins that can deliver better value will superseded its first mover advantage. I don't think anyone has yet imagined what all this new technology will eventually deliver but it becomes clearer every day that this is powerful technology, but it might take a decade to really see where it is all going.
Those are a few of my thoughts since you asked...in regard to DGB, this coin has proven it can innovate in a fast and efficient manner. I hold several million for that reason.
wondering if anyone can help me, im having trouble getting my wallet to sync i have updated to the latest version and it seems to be stuck at block 414819, like 3 days behind, it has been doin this for about 24 hours now, if anyone could help me i would much appreciate it 
