To me, it seems that you demonstrate a lack of grasp on reality, sir, and/or you have completely misunderstood WHY mining power has a direct correlation on price. I fully expect that you'll disregard this reply, but there are many rational people on these boards. I'm answering to your statement for their benefit. You're already a lost cause.
I won't disregard your post because I have valid counters. And I don't think you're a lost cause, not yet at least.
Currently $18k per day is spent on electricity to power the Bitcoin network. The VAST majority of miners are underwater, and running at a loss, or stealing electricity. Bitcoin can not succeed on Mom and Dads power bill.
I understand this and I already said so in my previous post. This is the obvious part, that there are way too many miners for the current price/difficulty.
You want Bitcoin to be at a higher price ONLY because out of the $2.30 that each bitcoin is worth, you and other miners spend $2.8 on electricity for every Bitcoin that is produced. If the cost to generate a bitcoin was $0.5, and the fair market value of bitcoin (established by REAL USE) was $1, you wouldn't be complaining about the price at all.
I'm one of the lucky who actually pay a static electricity bill (it's part of the rent) so my thinking process is a bit different. If I had to pay for electricity per usage, I would have probably stopped mining already.
So, you truly believe that the pressure to pay $500k + in electric bills per month has no effect on the price?
Of course it has an effect, but again there are only so many Bitcoins they can sell. The amount they can sell is the same regardless of the electric bill. It's important to understand that most miners are not running a professional mining business with massive electricity costs. Majority of mining power in the network come from small miners who can easily pay their electric bills from other income without selling a single Bitcoin, if they believe in Bitcoin and want to hold them.
MOST miners have to sell at least part (if not all) of their bitcoin to cover their bills. This is an outflow of ~$500k / mo. that does nothing to enrich the miners, and saps wealth and value from bitcoin directly through the CONSTANT selling of small amounts of coins on the exchanges.
Well, if someone out there is using all of their Bitcoin to cover the electricity costs, then that person is an idiot. No one in that situation should be running their mining rigs anymore, not for one second (with one exception, if the person gets enough heating from the rigs to make it profitable). The only justification to mine with a loss is that you pay the electricity with other income and save the Bitcoins with the expectation of future price increase. I don't personally even want another price bubble so if I were mining with a loss I would just stop, period.
Please, prove me wrong. There is no broad utility to Bitcoin at the moment, and if no new coins were generated for the next 2 years, we'd still have too many. Speculators have been subsidizing the cost of the network now for over 6 months, while the vast majority of bitcoin utility is inside of exchanges, where the network itself has little to no use. Your job as a miner is to validate transactions and when you find a block, include the valid transactions into that block. 40 transactions on average per block is pathetic, frankly, and tells me that a price of $2.3 is far too high.
I will try. For instance, there is an important graph which shows the mining cost per transaction. Based on this graph, it looks like we're currently at or near the bottom.
http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transactionFrom the weekly average chart it's even more clear:
http://blockchain.info/charts/cost-per-transaction?showDataPoints=false×pan=&daysAverageString=7&scale=0It certainly looks like we've returned to the pre-bubble era of Bitcoin as far as mining is concerned. The bubble has deflated. And there is no reason to believe it's going to go below pre-bubble levels.
Now the second issue you talk about is transactions. This can be quite easily countered looking at the daily transactions graphs:
http://www.blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions &
http://www.blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?showDataPoints=false×pan=&daysAverageString=7&scale=0These graphs actually have a fairly decent correlation with the price. The transaction bottom for now seems to be 5000 per day and there's even been a small uptrend recently. But looking at the past correlation for 5000 transactions, we are near or at the bottom in price as well. This is all I got for now, hopefully someone else can expand this discussion.