Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 09:54:55 PM

Quote from: Richy_T on Today at 08:40:14 PM

Quote from: JayJuanGee on Today at 06:34:13 PM

I do gather that you, richie, are inclined to follow the price follows hashrate nonsense,

Let me stop you right there. That is by no means the case and I don't believe I have ever stated anything that could even be construed as such.

As far as I'm concerned, we're in a process where Bitcoin is trying to find where its price matches its value (and I believe we are quite a long way yet) via the market discovery process. Along the way that will be moderated by a variety of mechanisms which I won't go into here but a little logic shows that this can only be accomplished via a volatile process (how volatile it needs to be is an interesting question but the actuality is that it has been violently volatile). This process seems to be fairly well divorced from the hashrate.

Now, the mechanism for hashrate seems to be "If Bitcoin is profitable, buy more equipment". That does potentially link hashrate and price (but not in the direction that the opinion you incorrectly ascribe to me would suggest). However, as Bitcoin as near as dammit always been profitable, the restricting factor has been equipment availability which has lead to a total divorce between the two concepts. I will say that on at least one occasion, miners have surprised me by being willing to be patient for future profits rather than following pragmatism but they surely had good reason and that doesn't really affect things much.

Well I am glad that you stated your position more specifically, and surely I am not proclaiming that any of us will be able to articulate the many ways that bitcoin price moves in one direction or another whether we are talking about short-term or long term, but those fairly simplified assertions that BTC price is lead by hashrate seem quite wanting in terms of their explanations and I am glad to hear that are not falling in that camp.

For sure, even if we might be asserting that BTC price does not necessarily follow hashrate or mining costs, for sure, for whatever reasons, there are going to be short-term correlations, and for sure a decently large numbers of miners are motivated by either current price or their speculations about future price, whether short-term, long-term or speculating about various aspects of operating their business that might also have some relationships to BTC price movements.. and for sure uncertainties too.. that are not just about BTC price, directly - such as energy costs or like you mentioned, cost and availability of some kinds of equipment or parts - or maybe another somewhat unrelated cost that you mentioned a while back.. the cost of wood to build a shed.. for example..

I may have mislead the bulk of you in what I meant in regards to miner's revenue and difficulty/hashrate.

The point was much deeper than hashrate, mining infrastructure has always dictated what equipment is available to the public. If it weren't for the lack of BFL Jalapenos I would probably not heard of Bitcoin for another year after I did.
Bitcoin is an peer-to-peer electronic "cache" system. It is a distributed ledger that stores data across the world. The price to pay to store information in the blockchain is paid by tx fee. The mining equipment and companies/people that are willing to store the database and run the software to support the network of transactions get rewarded with BTC. Currently the price to mine 1 BTC is ~$24,000. The price of Bitcoin is too high according to this data. Fortunately the supply is less than the demand thus affording the price to be higher than what it "costs" to mine.
Yes speculation plays a role but it is mainly driven by the mining infrastructure. Supply chain disruptions have had a reasonable effect on what should have been escalating difficulty thus driving cost of mining higher.

Also Lightning network turned Bitcoin into POS; robbing miners of the tx fees since those txs on LN aren't on-chain. Likely this did not have much difference but worth noting