Quote from: du5tin on Today at 03:55:49 PM

Does anyone think that the big mining players might be playing with their hash rates to limit difficulty growth?

I know some think otherwise but I don't see this possible.

It's easy to think as such thing possible as one might immediately draw a line with oil mining but it's not really the case, and one tiny difference is crucial. If the profitability goes beyond 1$/th, even poeple in Japan would be able to mine at a profit, if oil goes to 1000$/barrel you will still not see oil wells in Japan, for obvious reasons.
In the oil industry, you can cut production to increase the price, in mining, cutting production will simply let room for others to mine.

Let's play with this scenario, see a portion of the hash, like 100S19s as a representative, and the bad guys controlling 50% of it.

And S19 gets you 22$, so the bad guys get 1100$ and they burn at 4c/kwh 150$ of power, net profit 950$.
They decide to disable 10% of the total (20% of their own), so they have 40 S19, making 24.5 each, total revenue 980$, electricity costs 120, profit 860$. Worth it? Nope. Let's consider that the cost with the wages and rent are the same the profit goes down way faster.

Besides, two things
How do you suppress the rate? You buy gear you plug it and then take it offline?
Isn't keeping a lower difficulty making mining more attractive and thus making more people add more gear?

Quote from: du5tin on Today at 03:55:49 PM

If the difficulty keeps growing then the energy used by the mining industry also goes up which is overall unsustainable.

The consumption of energy is dictated by the price of the energy and the block reward.
If we have BTC going to 400k, the reward will also do a 10x but you don't have enough gear to make that 10x rise in consumption in the first place, and secondary you will not find 10x electricity at under 5 cents, demand and offer in the electricity market will take over, rising the costs and making mining less profitable, dropping down consumption. And till that happens we have another halving Wink