Makes you wonder how much gear is just sitting idle waiting for the price of BTC to go up or for enough for it to be worth it.
Not too much, I guess. New miners won't be ordered if they're not profitable at the moment, so only old miners can be idle. And considering the difficulty still went up this year, the share in hash rate from idle miners gets smaller until the moment they're not worth it anymore even if the Bitcoin price goes up a lot.
I know there are a lot of places sitting idle since it just does not pay to mine at the current prices, add $6000 to $9000, which is a lot of swing up from where it is but still possible in a short span of time. And all of a sudden there is going to be a bunch of us looking at the hashrate going where the hell did those miners come from?
Even if there's a sudden large increase in hash rate, that means some of them will drop out again after the next difficulty adjustment.