Topic: My last prediction of the year! This is a good one, I promise! (Read 2831 times)

Ok, let me try it this way:

supply is cut in half and there is a growing demand for it, so price would go up??? basic economics, no other voodoo.

No one is guaranteeing miners anything, least of all profitability. If they are necessary and useful, transaction fees will go up to replace the reward Bitcoins lost per block. Note this requires that users must feel _some_ pain if they want timely transactions.

Sorry if I have misunderstood something but mining is actually necessary to keep the blockchain updated with payments. It is therefore important to factor this into the argument for the future. When Bitcoin takes off as a payments system (both Bitcoin transactions and Fiat > Bitcoin > Fiat [think Bitpay] transactions) then miners are powering the engine that keeps this system going. It will be necessary that they remain profitable in order that they stay in business to power the system - the price of Bitcoins must be satisfactory to the miners - but you should also remember that they will take a share of transaction fees within the system, which should count for more, a lot more, in the future.

I was responding to another thread somewhere and a thought entered my fertile mind:

next halving of bitcoin will take place by end of 2015.

If you don't already know what "halving" means, it means that around every 10 minutes, a block of bitcoins will be rewarded to a miner and the reward will be halved from current 25 to 12.5 bitcoins.

The exact date and time of the next halving is not quite certain, it just depends upon how many blocks will have been mined then. As we all know, the hashrate has been greatly accelerating and this acceleration is causing the date and time of halving to be earlier and earlier than expected.

This event, "halving of bitcoin reward for mining", will most likely result in overnight spike in, whatelse, bitcoin price. It should at least double:

so, if the prevailing bitcoin price on, say, October 15, 2015 is $50,000 (which admittedly is a conservative amount) and if the halving takes place at midnight on October 15, 2015, then the next morning, October 16, 2015, we will see an overnight doubling to $100,000.

This is a highly simplified version of what can happen in 2015. Many people will drive up the bitcoin price IN ANTICIPATION prior to the event and there will be many opportunities for panic buying and panic selling as well, as new entrants try to grab the dwindling supply of the new coins.

These are tumultuous times.

mining becomes less and less relevant as bitcoin grows

Ok, let me try it this way:

supply is cut in half and there is a growing demand for it, so price would go up??? basic economics, no other voodoo.

I never claimed that you said it explicitly. There is a huge logical gap in your original post, which you still haven't explained, leaving the reader trying to guess what you mean. Why would the halving event cause the price to double?

[...]
so, if the prevailing bitcoin price on, say, October 15, 2015 is $50,000 (which admittedly is a conservative amount) and if the halving takes place at midnight on October 15, 2015, then the next morning, October 16, 2015, we will see an overnight doubling to $100,000.
[...]

I think we will see some large scale miners going out of business in the future.

And so thought they on November 28th 2012 that they would wake up the next morning to a price increase.....nothing happened. The market will have this priced in long before the action.

I was responding to another thread somewhere and a thought entered my fertile mind:

next halving of bitcoin will take place by end of 2015.

If you don't already know what "halving" means, it means that around every 10 minutes, a block of bitcoins will be rewarded to a miner and the reward will be halved from current 25 to 12.5 bitcoins.

The exact date and time of the next halving is not quite certain, it just depends upon how many blocks will have been mined then. As we all know, the hashrate has been greatly accelerating and this acceleration is causing the date and time of halving to be earlier and earlier than expected.

This event, "halving of bitcoin reward for mining", will most likely result in overnight spike in, whatelse, bitcoin price. It should at least double:

so, if the prevailing bitcoin price on, say, October 15, 2015 is $50,000 (which admittedly is a conservative amount) and if the halving takes place at midnight on October 15, 2015, then the next morning, October 16, 2015, we will see an overnight doubling to $100,000.

This is a highly simplified version of what can happen in 2015. Many people will drive up the bitcoin price IN ANTICIPATION prior to the event and there will be many opportunities for panic buying and panic selling as well, as new entrants try to grab the dwindling supply of the new coins.

These are tumultuous times.

And so thought they on November 28th 2012 that they would wake up the next morning to a price increase.....nothing happened. The market will have this priced in long before the action.

I am not saying that miners will abandon their mining operation and start buying bitcoins instead due to the halving event. Where did I say that in my original post?