Which never happens "sadly"

Most people have this misconception about bitcoin price vs hashrate/difficulty , this is normal for people who are not heavily invested in mining , but if you have been mining for long enough then you know that theory is invalid.

in theory, it makes sense that if price drops the following happens

1- mining becomes less profitable
2- hashrate decreases and so does difficulty.

While the first one is correct, the second one is invalid , the reason is "efficiency", mining gears become more efficient everyday, so consuming the same amount of energy today gets you more than double the hashrate as opposed of 2017.

another factor is , while miners as "PEOPLE" leave the game, mining gears take way too long to leave the network, simply because there are always people with cheaper power rate who will buy the mining gears from those who pay more for electricity , for an example , a guy in west EU can't make any more profit with say Antminer S9 today, that S9 won't be stored in the garage for good or thrown away, it will be sold to the guy in east EU or sent back to China and those guys who have better power rate will re-plug that S9 back to the network.


Below is a chart form Tradingview contains all hashrate data from 2010 to present day, each candle represents one full month of data




BTC had a few tragic bear markets, hashrate never really had , hashrate seldom goes down, it stays flat for a while and then move up, Bitmain is due to ship a dozen of mining gears during this month (pre-order) , and my guess is that even if price keeps going lower , hashrate will only go higher for months to come, unless something out of the ordinary happens.


If I may, i would add a "cheat" tool for this giveaway  , this tool predicts the next difficulty , sadly it's less efficient for long term since the deadline is 06.12.2019,  this other tool contains historical data inculding number of blocks found in each round, not really the best way to estimate a block that's a month away, but a good tool to give you an "outside the box" view of how this difficulty thing actually effects the block production.


@miau sorry for this long post, I tried to stay on topic as much as i could , I just can't help not posting when it's anything mining related, I will post my guess later after discussing the matter with Jihan Wu.