With regards to clever, the algo change is specifically about profit. We need to limit the period of mining profitability and we need to do it faster than we currently do. It is a profits game for them, so we need to take that away from them.
I like your graphs, but I'm not sure if you're looking at them correctly. The correlation between difficulty and price might be getting skewed, if I'm reading your post correctly. Correct me if I'm wrong(it's 4am and the baby is fussy). The reason you're seeing a direct correlation is because clever is causing it. Clever isn't a traditional miner that stores their coins and spends a little here and there. They instadump their coins for BTC/LTC. I'd suspect you'd see a trailing correlation if you took a closer look. Clever mines a super low series of blocks, and then the price drops shortly after. Price isn't driving difficulty in our case right now, but rather difficulty driving price. Clever mines easy blocks, clever sells easy blocks. If it wasn't for the dedicated miners propping up the nethash, clever would probably own the whole chain and the price would be much lower than it is now. You are 100% correct though that in a free market environment, price would drive difficulty via more dedicated miners. We just aren't in a free market right now.
I would suspect you are correct with the orange/blue observation. The bottom of that graph would be very blue. If you have the time, please chart it. Anyone else could as well. You just need two data sets, one for clever's blocks, and one for everyone else.
-Fuse
Fuse: Very good points I hadn't considered. Thanks. I'm not convinced a traditional miner will be holding a lot of the NLG they obtain, but I very well could be wrong on that. I'm just trying to compare NLG to something like BTC. There are probably studies that estimate what % of BTC mined get converted to fiat. Go get some sleep
--Mark
)
