Ahh but it has happened under the video card era, and there was no drop. There's no reason to believe ASIC operators would be any different.
I wouldn't bet on that too much. I've been doing the math, and I will be shunting my 65nm equipment down to "minimum power draw" mode at the end of May. Reducing the voltage to the chips and the clock rate will cut the power use in half, along with the heat generated while dropping the hashing speed by 20-25%. That should keep me going till August, at which point I will shut the miners down.
There is no economic reason to mine once the cost of electricity is more than the bitcoin value generated. It's not even a dollar auction, the hole you're digging is getting deeper because of the electricity costs.
The economic answer is to buy someone else's bitcoins. Which will push up the price of BTC which will cause miners to come back which will re-establish equilibrium.
Anyone still mining btc with a GPU is being totally economically irrational. What the GPU people seem to have done is hit on this whole Litecoin baloney thing which gives their equipment a pseudo reason to exist. Why people pay good bitcoins for Script is not something I quite understand.
Only if those data centers are relying on immediate BTC sale to pay their day to day bills. If they're in it for long positions, the daily exchange rate means diddly squat.
If you're in it for a long position then why not stop mining and buy the bitcoin on the market once it doesn't cover electricity costs? Let someone else pay the difference for you.
Also remember that there's more to mining than just acquiring BTC. If there were not, there would be no ASIC sales. There's not a single machine you can order today that will make more than it costs in BTC over its lifetime. Yet they still continue to sell.
Exactly. This is not economically rational, people do it anyway. If you do choose to be such, own it and accept it. It's fine, it's entertainment and all that.
C