Excluding hardware costs, what is the USD cost of electricity required to generate 1 BTC?
That's the price around which BTC will stabilize, I think. If the price is higher than that cost, miners will generate new coins and sell to push the price down. Below that cost and the miners will turn off their mining rigs. Since they are not mining at that point, they won't have new BTC to sell. Of course other sellers could continue to aggressively push the price down but at least the miners won't be the ones doing the selling.
miners want to sell high like everyone else, the last thing they want is to push the price down.
if the miner start turning of the rigs the difficultly will go down making it possible for small time miners to get back in the game.
the cost of btc will always be as high as poeple are willing to pay, and not as low as the miners are willing to sell. IMO
This is true. The only reason price has been so god damned volatile in the past is because bitcoins were being sold for X10 what it costs to actually produce them, giving people plenty of options for pricing. Once the btc cost to mine is just break even, price will not fluctuate too much. People won't be selling for less than they're worth (an individuals cost to mine them)