3600 coins are currently added to the system per day. There are currently ~12.6M coins in circulation.
So that's an increase of .02% per day.
This doesn't come close to accounting for the price swings we've seen in the last 6 months. There are much larger forces at work. What these forces are exactly is...difficult to determine.
Percentage of total coins isn't the correct comparison, it's the percentage of total volume. We're on a pretty high volume day right now and the 24hr volume is at 150k. Some days it's a fraction of that, there have been multiple < 20k days recently. Depending on the day the mined coins are a significant percentage of the total being exchanged (not that all mined coins would be exchanged, but it's a fairly high number otherwise most people wouldn't have any BTC unless they mined it).
Regarding price, percentage of volume is the important metric. It is not relevant that ~12M bitcoins exist, if only, say, 1% of these are for sale on exchanges. Only coins for sale on exchanges help stabilize the price.
>> There are much larger forces at work. What these forces are exactly is...difficult to determine.
How about: "lots of people who bought at the top of the BTC hype are now abandoning the BTC market because they lost faith in their get-rich-quick scheme?"
The meteoric rise and slow but steady deflation in the BTC price you see now has all the properties of a classic, media-fueled bubble. At one point people who were never interested in monetary systems or cryptocurrencies at all, were asking me how they could buy BTC because they heard on the news it went from $100 to $500 in a few weeks. These are not idealists or miners, but just hoped to ride the hype train up and make a few quick bucks without actually having to work for it.
I don't think it's 'difficult to determine' why it's fading now. Maybe if you completely live in a kind of echo-chamber that HN appears to be on topics like this, but looking from the outside it all makes perfect sense.
Ya, I mostly agree with you. The devil is in the details though. Why is it fading at the rate it is? Why did it drop to ~350 but then bump back up to ~425? It's seemingly pretty random (at least to me).
So that's an increase of .02% per day.
This doesn't come close to accounting for the price swings we've seen in the last 6 months. There are much larger forces at work. What these forces are exactly is...difficult to determine.