let's assume miners have a terrible time adjusting to the reward drop, hash rate drops and bitcoin experiences longer than usual confirmation delays for 2 weeks.
do you as a speculator care about this?
We cared when it was 400$ a coin. It's 800'ish now. Meaning miners will be making pretty much the same money.
On the other hand, the inflationary effect of requiring 1.44mn USD per day to absorb inflation, is preserved.
Meaning that if the market needed 400$ x 3600 coins = 1.44mn USD just to maintain daily price, now it's kind of the same with 800$ x 1800 coins (=again 1.44mn USD to absorb daily supply).
Many of us recognized that the halvening causing a drop in the hashrate and therefore causing less security and incentive in the mining system and therefore a drop in the price was really bullshit and red herring kind of argument - especially in bitcoin, there has been a continuous speculative component regarding these kinds of price spikes occurring "some day", and even in the $200s miners were continuing to mine, whether profitable or not based on speculation regarding future prices...
Yeah, sure, if there had been a very prolonged period of $200 or even inability in bitcoin for the prices to significantly increase, at some point, little by little (and individually) miners would have begun to pull away and shut down their operations, etc etc.. (which would have caused some incentive for the remaining miners to stay in). Anyhow, the whole argument regarding hashing dropping with halvening was like a low probability event - probably less than 10%, but more likely even quite lower than that.
But now that we see the price increase scenario playing out, the scenario should be more obvious, as AlexGR describes above... and additionally, they are going to continue to speculate and they are, individually, going to come to differing conclusions within their speculation, and to the extent that their speculation remains positive, the whole BTC infrastructure benefits from increased security and increased investment into bitcoin computing power.
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