"The next block reward halving is coming up in July. Let’s say that miners on average are able to mine a coin for $250 (I don’t know the exact number, so this is a guess). After the halving in July their cost to mine a coin will double to $500. If the bitcoin price stays around $425, it will be unprofitable for a number of miners to continue mining.
The implication of this is that we could see a reduction of hashing power on the network at the July halving date. Perhaps in the range of 10–50% (I don’t have a good way to estimate this, if anyone does please post it).
In a worst case, let’s say that 50% of hashing power turns off at the block halving because it is no longer profitable for those miners. This would mean that we start getting blocks mined every 20 minutes on average instead of 10 minutes. But blocks are already 70% full today. If the average confirmation time goes to 20 minutes, it means that we will be at 140% of capacity on every block, and start accumulating a backlog."
Brian Armstrong speaks, and the price retreats.
Like clockwork. Every single time.