Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but looking at hardware prices, might also support the case that "miners are hoarders".
(Please excuse the sketchy math in the following post. these figures are just based on searches on Ebay/Google. Most of all I don't know who's doing the majority of the mining and at what scale.)*
(Low End) ($490 investment in mining)
At the current level of mining difficulty a machine that has a hash rate in the 200/g/. Returns about $6.00 worth of BTC a day.
http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.
I searched "200 gh/s" in a site that crawls Ebay, The machines for sale at this hash-rate costs about 490. You would recoup the cost of the machine in 81 days.
If it takes 81 days to break even on your investment, even if bitcoin doubles in that time frame you basically made the price of the machine as profit ($490 in 81 days). (meh)
(High End) (18k investment in mining)
Machines in the single digit tera-hash realm come in at under 20k, they peak at 15-20K per machine. Let's average the price at 18k. They make $90 a day according to the calculator. This would mean you would need 200 days to recuperate the cost of the machine.
In this case it takes 200 days to break even on your investment. If bitcoin doubles in that time frame you made 18k in 200 days. (the online calculator said power costs in this time frame are around $70.)
I'm assuming individuals in both these positions are have long-term holding in mind. My rationale is: getting substantially richer in either case requires the price per coin becomes drastically higher. You're also not hemorrhaging money in either case (power costs seem reasonable). It makes more sense for miners to hold as much of what they mine as possible. Both positions seem to hedged on a BTC being priced a lot more higher, in this sense hard to imagine miners to be selling in great quantities.
I also feel that people DIRECTLY buying and selling bitcoin would dwarf the selling pressure of the majority of miners. The barriers of entry for this also seem much lower than setting up the hardware.
(Please excuse the sketchy math in the following post. these figures are just based on searches on Ebay/Google. Most of all I don't know who's doing the majority of the mining and at what scale.)*
(Low End) ($490 investment in mining) At the current level of mining difficulty a machine that has a hash rate in the 200/g/. Returns about $6.00 worth of BTC a day. http://www.alloscomp.com/bitcoin/calculator.
I searched "200 gh/s" in a site that crawls Ebay, The machines for sale at this hash-rate costs about 490. You would recoup the cost of the machine in 81 days.
http://www.thepricegeek.com/results/200+gh%2Fs?country=us
If it takes 81 days to break even on your investment, even if bitcoin doubles in that time frame you basically made the price of the machine as profit ($490 in 81 days). (meh)
(High End) (18k investment in mining)
Machines in the single digit tera-hash realm come in at under 20k, they peak at 15-20K per machine. Let's average the price at 18k. They make $90 a day according to the calculator. This would mean you would need 200 days to recuperate the cost of the machine.
In this case it takes 200 days to break even on your investment. If bitcoin doubles in that time frame you made 18k in 200 days. (the online calculator said power costs in this time frame are around $70.)
I'm assuming individuals in both these positions are have long-term holding in mind. My rationale is: getting substantially richer in either case requires the price per coin becomes drastically higher. You're also not hemorrhaging money in either case (power costs seem reasonable). It makes more sense for miners to hold as much of what they mine as possible. Both positions seem to hedged on a BTC being priced a lot more higher, in this sense hard to imagine miners to be selling in great quantities.
I also feel that people DIRECTLY buying and selling bitcoin would dwarf the selling pressure of the majority of miners. The barriers of entry for this also seem much lower than setting up the hardware.