sorry gentlemen, but this cannot be true


mining most certainly does influence price in the most foundational way: with zero hashrate, there is no network, and hence Bitcoin is meaningless. That means that every additional hash per second is at a minimum serving as ballast against a hashrate of zero.

and this is without paying regard to the fact that the hashrate provides protection against several different attacks, and that the amount of protection is commensurate with the hashrate (i.e. Bitcoin is increasingly safer from these the more the hashrate increases).

One cannot directly correlate the effect of changes in the network hashrate with changes in the market price, but if we fail to recognize that hashrate is a (literally) vital part of what makes up Bitcoin's value proposition (and price is a measure of Bitcoin's value), that would constitute a fatal misunderstanding Bitcoin's market dynamics.