Rampion is probably correct about the problem that will be caused by ASICs. When people were frenzied to buy AM Blades at 50BTC @ $120-130 USD it was under the condition wherein 13GH would mine you 25-30-40BTC a month. But in the last few weeks difficulty has climbed so high that 13GH will mine you ~7BTC per month, and this is just discussing the problem for people who have Blades, one of the only ASICs you can buy and actually have in-hand without a 2-6 month waiting period, and only discussing the problem in the context of current difficulty, and not considering the fact that $120-130 USD is pretty much out of reach right now.

On top of that, the market has lost a lot of its buyers. These large periods of stagnation and only being able to sustain $97-98 are because Gox is no longer experiencing the "several million USD are being wired to our exchange every day! " phenomena that it was after/during the 266-50-165 era. A lot of the money that _was_ wired to Gox is now sitting in the hands of the whales who profited from the bubbles and in Gox's rake box. After all, the only reason we're not still sitting at 60-70 is because _one_ person put down a 15kBTC market order to push it through $80. It's not because there were hundreds or thousands of people looking to buy, eating through resistance.

The dilemma with ASICs is similar to the dilemma created when lots of people buy at the top of a rush and momentum runs out and it drops hard after. Everyone wants to get out alive. It'll be worse with ASICs because people bought from frauds like BFL and Avalon who can't be fucked to actually deliver the product when it's ready because it's more profitable for them to mine on it themselves as "burn in", only delivering the miners to the people who paid for them when the ship has already sailed.

People are itchy indeed. Right now people are anxiously waiting to see if someone will market buy to carry us into $110s again. If it doesn't happen, we will definitely go down hard.  

It sounds like mr Market's manic depressive phase is on :p

And with LTC I'm up against other GPU miners, not ASICs

What difference does it make if you mine LTC or BTC if LTC price is constant fraction of BTC? (long term)

Pretty much agree. The price feels completely distorted, there's even been a bounty for someone to show a wire going thru after the hiatus and nobody was able to post a screenshot. Wow, that's puzzling. If people cannot withdraw their fiat, they will slowly buy BTC to move it to other exchanges, maintaining the price artificially high on Gox; the other exchanges, keep following Gox (even if they are decoupling now) because at the end of the day, MtGox its still the biggest market by far.

Fair point, and quite encouraging. But that won't happen until they're convinced we've reached the bottom.

Whenever that happens, I look forward to the buyers vs commercial-miners battle!

Even the major betting houses are offering bitcoin price speculation... http://www.paddypower.com/bet/novelty-betting/current-affairs/bitcoin-betting

OT but, I thought the Julian Assange 'How will he leave the Ecuadorian Embassy?', had a funny option....by Jetpack - 500/1   

What I have learned from observation is most miners save the XBT, some spend X% and a few triad with X% but the majority are saved.

ASICMiner is a new type of miner they get about 900 coins a day and those coins go to "investors" not miners. (The new dollar extraction)


Not much Fiat is entering the system to buy ASIC's the ASIC suppliers who are delivering are charging XBT, and there is a long ROI on those purchases up to 3 years calculated when in XBT. (ROI in XBT = saving XBT)

The ASIC manufacturers (and Mining funds) on the other hand have hard expenses in fiat, so they are converting new XBT to fiat at the moment.  

If we stay in the $100 target, the ASIC manufactures do more of the same and difficulty increases exponentially, if the price dips the demand for high priced Asics will diminish and the manufacturers will have to innovate.  

We are approaching equilibrium with difficulty related to price, so we should expect change soon.