is about the economic mentality/sentiment of assessing costs/profit even before mining or buying or spending or selling
So to summarize you say that mining cost determines or at least has a big influence on the Bitcoin price, because people compare mining cost all the time with the current market price and buy when the market cost is lower than the mining cost, right?
The thing is that this view ignores that the main influence is actually the other way around. Bitcoin price determines the plans of miners: will I scale up? Or will I divest or diversify my business into AI and cloud because scaling up currently makes no sense? In another discussion I concluded that the mining market currently is bloated, i.e. the cost/profit relation is quite high and it's likely that miners will scale down / divest in the next months. However most of the time it's the other way around: due to other market forces (see below) the price goes up (in the mid/long term) and miners actually scale up due to that.
And really ... how many people think about buying mining hardware (or some kinds of shares from mining businesses) nowadays when they think about how to profit from Bitcoin? While some wealthy individuals and companies probably do that, I would wildly guess that at least 95% of the market doesn't.
also the whole "supply/demand" silly notion many were taught in kindergarden is bad math bad business education..
lack of supply does not = demand and abundance of supply does not mean less demand or less in price
Nobody wrote that actually in this discussion
![Smiley](https://bitcointalk.org/Smileys/default/smiley.gif)
The demand is driven by a lot of different factors. Currently I think it's mainly mid-term price expectations, i.e. "will I profit in 6 months or 1 year if I buy Bitcoin now?" -> if the answer is yes, then the demand is increased by one buyer. Or at the contrary "will I be better off if I sell now than holding?" or even "did I reach the goals of my investment in
BTC, e.g. because now I can buy a house with my $1000 investment 5 years ago?" -> these two persons go to the supply side.
But underlying to these questions are different assumptions how the market will behave in this timeframe. And here we could cite, for example:
- fundamental assumptions about continued adoption (as digital gold or currency or for which usecase, doesn't matter here)
- technical analysis
- awareness / fads: "are we in an euphoria/FOMO phase or in a fear/bearish phase? Can I ride this wave (up or down)?"
And also what you write yourself:
there is also a matter about even if there was just 1m coins deposited on a market. the order amounts per price, the increments between orders and many other aspects affect the price
So market depth is also part of the equation. It's extremely complex, and that is also why we have such a high volatility: because nobody has created a magic formula giving each of these assumptions a value and a weight, to know if Bitcoin currently is "fairly priced", overvalued or undervalued.
Mining cost is a factor which can perhaps, for a very small group of people interested into a Bitcoin-related investment, trigger the decision "mining or buying". But my assumption is that the group of people, even whales, taking other things into account like those I listed above is much larger. In addition, this is only a group which could add slightly more demand (via mining or buying) but never to the market supply, because the miner supply as we all know is static, so it doesn't matter how many miners are mining.