Lol, I remember when the oil shippers made tons of money and also when they went belly up and lost it all. Too much overcapacity is right. The comparison of shippers to miners is appropriate. And there's a lot more capacity coming online this year so profit will be declining in BTC mining as profit declined for the shippers! Anyone paying over 2k for a 13TH miner now will probably never break even!
Yep, they did at first. The smart ones are those that sold out early but most sold out only after huge losses or near bankruptcy. Everyone expected to do better than their competitor. In shipowners case, everything from the shipowners to shipyards suffered. Tons of layoffs and some went bankrupt. Survivors lost alot of money.
Another thing shippers did back then when oil price was above 100 bucks was to spend more on more fuel efficient vessels since fuel cost are around 40-60% of operating costs. Unfortunately, everyone had the same idea to outmaneuver their competitors lol. That increased the tonnage overcapacity further as they competed more. I believe this will also be the case if btc price were to suddenly jump. Everyone will wanna buy an ASIC, news sources will trumpet it and mining difficulty will skyrocket to these bad numbers again.