This post is pure speculation but it's something that I've been thinking about for a while. This post is informational - it's not a quick FUD/FOMO analysis. However, I do make a case for being a long-term bull (i.e. years).
There are two major groups with large individual resources: miners and crypto investors. These aren't your general traders, these are large, multi-million dollar groups (or larger). Let's look at motivations of both to see how it can relate to prices.
Crypto Miners
Miners obviously want maximum profit. There are several ways to do this:
- cut costs by buying cheaper hardware. Due to the crypto market bonanza in 2017, prices for various rigs have skyrocketed, even ASICs.
- increase price of crypto. If you can't cut costs, increase price of crypto through market manipulation (basically market buys which wipes out order books).
Note that Bitcoin's difficulty is at all-time high. Litecoin too. Increased difficulty means the same equipment will take longer to generate the same reward. Also note that with the upcoming halving - coming in a month for Litecoin and next year for Bitcoin - the reward for each crypto will significantly decrease. This means that - all else being equal - the profit for miners will drop significantly (temporarily, at least).
The other news is that your typical miner isn't making a lot of money. Like many other examples, economies of scale come into play and your big investors that have large facilities and equipment are the ones making more money. This means more power in the hands of fewer people who have a larger investment with their various interests. How is an individual going to compete with something like this?
Also note that when the crypto market fell at the end of 2017, miner manufacturers had losses due to lack of new buyers. This led to a collapse in prices for various ASIC equipment and related hardware. This does affect stock market prices. Although crypto hardware isn't exactly a huge profit center, check out stock prices for AMD, Intel, and NVidia for the last 5 years. You'll see articles like this and this that support my conclusions. Someone could dig more into this to get better numbers.
Crypto Investors
Crypto investors (the whales), don't really care as much about buying vs. selling - they can profit in either move in the price. However, shorting is risky and shorting crypto is very risky so more are likely to err on the side of growth. It also benefits them for any large swing in prices as opposed to steady growth. They want the market to continue to grow since if it shrinks, it can be destroyed and their profits will go away. They also don't want the market to get too large too fast but some things are beyond their control once they overheat. They're frustrated since they want to pump a lot of money into this - for massive profits - but this attention will be noticed. For instance, if some whale invests $50b into Bitcoin, it'll cause havok on the market and the prices so they have to have relatively small investments. The big institutions want to throw more money into it but they know that if they do, the market will get out of hand. Being noticed invites unwanted regulations and this leads to loss of control and, likely, lower prices with less opportunity.
Note that the interests of both miners and investors sometimes overlap. For instance, miners want the crypto price to be higher so they have higher profits. Investors will also receive the rewards through higher prices.
However, sometimes their interests are in conflict. For instance, if I was running a mining business and I had some resources, here's what I see: an increasing rise in costs due to higher ASIC prices, lower reward due to higher difficulty, and lower reward due to halving.
What's my solution? I would:
- try to manipulate the market to raise the price of crypto to make mining more profitable
- from time to time, try to crash the market to make equipment prices collapse so I can stock up on new equipment and then raise the market again
- prices of various ASICS have fallen by over 2/3 and are coming back up again. If I can have a 66% off sale to replace my equipment so I can buy it then I would do that and use profits from shorting crypto to buy the new equipment and then wait for the market to spike again (and help it along)
You can see how investors could be working for this where some miners could get money together to hire professional traders to do this. Same with companies like AMD, Intel, NVidia, and others (ex: Samsung) who stand to make a lot of money selling this equipment.
The simple problem with crypto is for it to succeed:
- market needs to continue to grow
- as a result, more halving events will continue to happen (mathematical certainty)
- meaning rewards will continue to decrease
- difficulty will continue to increase
- so if prices stagnate, miners will be out of business
The only solution is for the miners - and their suppliers - to continue to pump crypto prices higher to maximize their profits... indefinitely. Investors help out with raising prices but they also help when the market overheats and they cash out and/or short. A market crash temporarily helps miners who can now buy cheaper equipment.
We've all seen charts like these. How else can you explain such projectors (due to past history)? You do that with the continued - almost mathematically calculated - rises and falls in prices over time. If you add in difficulty, ASIC prices, and miner profitability, I'm sure you'll see a pattern. Larger difficulty (i.e. more costs) and higher hardware prices require higher crypto prices for miners to continue to be in business. Considering the market is still relatively small, it's easier to manipulate for higher prices.
No comments:
Post a Comment