I've been assuming a 50% increase per month for up to one year. With beginning difficulty between 25 and 40mil.
50% increase continuing for a full year? That seems unrealistic. Assuming a starting point of around 500 Th/s, that would put total has of network at 50+ Ph/s 12 months later. Even at an ASIC generation 2 price of say 0.10 BTC per Gh/s that is $500 million cost just for the miners. The only way that could happen would be for the exchange rate to have some extraordinary growth. Could happen I guess, in which case I won't care that my mining hardware investment didn't get a ROI.
quite the opposite. The exchange rate will sink and enormously as miners attempting to keep up will transfer savings btc to chip sellers which then naturally must convert that btc to fiat to manufacture more chips creating huge sell pressure on the rate. It's not like your avg Chinese worker wants to take salary in btc or pay rent and power bill in china with btc
I too came to a similar conclusion, however, the chip purchases are mostly from Avalon, and they are still sitting on their bitcoin (albeit possibly handing them off, off of the exchanges)
So only the remainder of the production of working units need fiat currency to be done, which cuts the actual exchange based conversion of bitcoin to fiat by more than 50%.
I think my calculations showed that we're talking of a total fiat conversion of about 2 million dollars so far, and with a market cap of bitcoin around a billion dollar, this is a very small fraction of the current currency value. I came to the conclusion that it is not the ASIC investments that are driving down the price, but general lack of faith, ie shaking out of weak hands.
So it is interesting to see that we have a decline in bitcoin price based on the quoted assumptions when in reality, bitcoiners are not losing faith, how else would you explain 2-4 million dollars worth of investments going into securing the network? It wouldn't make sense. What we are witnessing however, is the power to printing bitcoin 'money' changing hands, away from the old GPU into ASICs and possibly even those people behind the GPU and ASIC machine setups, are very much different people. Some are getting out, while a new generation of bitcoiners are coming in.
I think to myself, better get ready for growth phase 2 of bitcoin, now that the pioneering age of bitcoin is coming to a conclusion and we're entering into early adopter and growth phase of bitcoin.
I certainly won't stand in the way of the weak hands getting out now. After all, it makes the bitcoin priced Avalon chips, cheaper, and I trade in fiat to pay for the rest