what will be consequence of the low bitcoin price for the difficulty? will it rise not as fast as normal?
there is no link between difficulty and price, difficulty goes high as miners add mining power, and this has no direct connection to the price of btc.
but if the price is low arent people less willing to invest in mining hardware?
Ppl already invested with pre-orders up to may-june (maybe july?). That pre-ordered hashing power will come online anyway.
By then, bitcoin price can... well, you know, can do anything
There is a link between price and difficulty. If the price stays low enough for long enough some miners will either turn off their equipment or point it towards other coins. You also can not be 100% sure that all of the march/april/may/june orders will bet turned on immediately either, there is a likely chance that some will be sold because they are not as profitable as when the order was placed, and they might sit unused until they sell.
Small miner will switch off their hardware in some months, the total hash rate is at a level that only company with huge capitals can buy new hardware, so the hardware that is switched off is a small fraction of the total computational power that is in hands of cex.io, big players in btcguild and (i hope) in the nearest future from our investment in petamine. So only the big can continue to play the game and for shure difficulty will never stop in the next months when all next gen of asic chips come to the market. The price that can negotiate a big company probably is not the street price where can buy small miners. (For me) this is the trend scenario, so price will not perfectly pairs with difficulty... (This is my personal opinion...)
Cheers
And what do you think is going to happen to those mega farms if btc stays this low?
Those farms were built to make money and they likely can not go too many months in a row with a negative return.
As the difficulty increases, it squeezes their profits. If BTC/usd stays low enough even the mega farms might run into issues.
Considering the mega farms out there now are built on older tech, IE 55nm or worse, they are probably being squeezed even now for profits. I would bet that quite a few were built on debt, and if bitcoin doesnt rebound in price soon they just might be forced to shut down.
You are basing your thoughts on the next gen tech, 28nm just started shipping, and only knc is working on 20nm at the moment and they arent even close to shipping.
I reiterate what I and others have posted, its likely that we will see it level off around 100PHS/10-12Billion difficulty.
How many foundries do you think are operating producing 28nm chips? How many THS/day do you think they can stamp out. And then they have to be shipped either to end customers who will produce their own hardware, or to folks like cointerra/bitmine that will produce hardware for the end customer, and you see how many devices cointerra/bitmine can produce+ship on a daily basis, not that much.