ok so now we agree that efficiency is not the most important factor as far as difficulty is concerned, after all 100% improvement over the course of 4 years and millions of dollars spend on research is not impressive to say the least.
there is always pressure to the 4-7 cent earning range.
That is the main point, in fact as time passes the pressure gets down to those with cheaper power, at one point only those with 0-2 cent might really actually make money , I am not talking about making profit on daily bases, I am talking about making more profit that simply hodling btc or keeping your money at bank for 0.25% interest rate or whatever that is where you live.
people have this misconception of profitably not changing a lot because price moves difficulty, thus any investment at any given time will yield the same profit in average, which is not the case at all.
let's zoom-out and have a look at these 3 charts that represent data of nearly 9 years starting July 2010 and ending today.
1- Price
2-Difficulty
3-Mining Profitability
Theoretically,Mining Profitability should stay flat, or at worst case scenario, should decrease slowly given that the cost of buying 1TH is decreasing as well.
in fact here is a funny story, mining profitability now is nearly exactly the same as it was back in Jan 2019 when price was hanging at about 3k , with most efficient gears are due to ship later this year , it is safe to assume that the majority of extra 50E addition in hashrate since then, did not come only from the new efficient gears, so what happened?
My take on this that people with cheap power (2 cents or so )as phill explained are still filling in those mining farms with old gears such as S9 or even T9, in fact a T9 that goes for as cheap as a 100$ makes almost 30$ a month at 2 cents kw so there is really no reason why they wouldn't be adding more of those.
So where do the 4-7 cents per kw miners stand in all this mess? a T9 at 4 cents makes only 7.5$ a month and loses at 5 cents , S9 does not look much better, so ultimately the 4-7 cents people have no option but to pay premium for a gear that is only double efficient.
now let's examine the situation and see how it goes for buying say S17 pro today for 3500$ ( the most efficient gear), and based on the profitability chart it's pretty obvious that we are only going down, despite the spikes here and there the average trend is down, we are at 18 cents per th today, the numbers say we are going much lower, but let's assume we stay flat for the sake of it.
S17 pro makes 5.54$ per day at 5 cents that is 166$ per month , so you are looking at 21 months to ROI and hey , that is probably the BEST scenario you are going to have, and you are actually paying 0.45 bitcoin for that gear , it's almost nearly impossible to mine that much before either the miner dies or becomes unprofitable and you sell it for 200-300$ to those guys who have 2 cents per kwh.
I am kinda mixing a few topics at once, but it's really all related, since people who pay more for power count totally on efficiency, efficiency does not move nearly 1/10 as fast as difficulty does, I just don't see the logic here, can somebody who paid a fortune for these gears and has 5-7 cent per kwh rate explain the logic behind their move?