Anticipation could have affected exchange rates earlier. Also affected: prior investment in rigs given expected-payback and risk levels.
But the decision "with my current fixed plant, do I mine this hour, or not?" is unaffected by anticipation. Either the expected-reward is enough to pay incremental costs, or not.
The expected reward for the same hashing power is now half what it was. Surely, some marginal miners who were only slightly profitable before are now non-profitable. It may take them a while to notice, but when they do, they're likely to drop out. But this is far from half of the mining capacity, and other rigs that are still profitable at the new reward rate are still coming online.
I expect difficulty to trend down a bit in the very short term... but not by half, and not for long as lower-power rigs continue to come online.
>But the decision "with my current fixed plant, do I mine this hour, or not?" is unaffected by anticipation. Either the expected-reward is enough to pay incremental costs, or not.
Some people use mining as a way to privately purchase Bitcoins, and/or are speculating that the value will rise long term. Some would rather pay $105 of power and not have a banking paper trail connecting them to their coin purchases (usually because they are kind of paranoid or doing something legally questionable) than pay $100 to purchase the coins on an exchange.
Also, if you've never mined, there is something kind of geek-magical about creating money with your computer.
Yes, sure. I've mined, and even mined for a bit at an occasional loss after hitting punitive over-baseline electric rates).
But it's farfetched to predict that everyone who was willing to do something when the bitcoin reward was X will still be willing to do it, in the exact same amount, when the reward is reduced to X/2. (Even if the goal is 'anonymous bitcoins' at above-market rates, they've still become twice as costly.) Demand curves slope down, supply curves slope up, exceptions are rare and not in evidence here.
But the decision "with my current fixed plant, do I mine this hour, or not?" is unaffected by anticipation. Either the expected-reward is enough to pay incremental costs, or not.
The expected reward for the same hashing power is now half what it was. Surely, some marginal miners who were only slightly profitable before are now non-profitable. It may take them a while to notice, but when they do, they're likely to drop out. But this is far from half of the mining capacity, and other rigs that are still profitable at the new reward rate are still coming online.
I expect difficulty to trend down a bit in the very short term... but not by half, and not for long as lower-power rigs continue to come online.