Does anyone think that the big mining players might be playing with their hash rates to limit difficulty growth? If the difficulty keeps growing then the energy used by the mining industry also goes up which is overall unsustainable. Eventually we should want to see a stabilization of the difficulty and the price so that BTC could be used more like a currency rather than a gold replacement. Also so that the network’s energy consumption could be optimized and eventually reduced. I think part of the reason we are seeing bans in some countries is their base energy load could be better used towards improving quality of life for their citizens instead of some non-resident miner.