4) Market cap is determined by market makers and market makers plan to raise the price. People don't build 100 million dollar mining facilities and then let the price be determined by sheer luck or fate.
The mining profit will come from increasing transaction fees × transaction volume. The problem is that increasing the block size too much will lower the fees. This is why this has been such a contentious issue. The mining cartel in China wants to make sure they can set the block size to maximize that multiplicative product. Why do others not able to deduce what is so obvious to me
Bitcoin's volatility makes that entirely insignificant. Bitcoin can't be a currency until it has an economy where it is the unit-of-account. Well it actually has one, that is Bitcoin is the unit-of-account of the crypto gambling economy.
This is more important than you may realize. The Chinese are trying to trade their BTC for ETH, so they can control Ethereum when it goes Proof-of-Stake in Casper. So they can control the block sizes so they can maximize the transaction fees × transaction volume multiplicative product. Realize the Chinese want to control that multiplicative product for all major CCs. They will control the #1 PoW coin Bitcoin and the #1 PoS coin Ethereum. They control Bitcoin via ASIC mining and Ethereum by owning a majority of the ETH.
This is another reason ETH will rise again after BTC peaks at $500:
Btw, I think a double-top for ETH at $15 is likely. Too much bad news has come out, sentiment is negative, and I had always said it would bounce at $7. There needs to be a GPU mineable alternative to Bitcoin, same as the role Litecoin provided. It doesn't matter that ETH has no adoption. It is purely a store-of-value arbitrage/speculation proposition.