I didn't dare ask the question in the other thread, so thank you for creating this one. Is it the power shortage in China that is responsible for the huge drop in hashrate OR because people switched over to mining BCH when the earnings were significantly higher than BTC?
Reading this makes me sad, honestly, this is a BTC-related question, I hate to see it asked in the altcoin section.
To answer your question, first of all, the coal mine explosion in China (Xinjiang ) is real, pools reported an average of 25-30% drop in their reported hashrate right after the explosion, the hashrate drop happened to ALL sha256 coins, along with BCH price going up against BTC and what seemed like a larger drop in BCH hashrate compared to
BTC percentage-wise, mining BCH was about 25% or more profitable than mining
BTC.
More hash power was migrating from BTC which has already lost enough hashrate to other more profitable "back then" coins, which contributed more to the hashrate drop in BTC, but the migrating has a small impact compared to the mine explosion, why do I say so? because more than 30EH was gone from SHA256, all the other Altcoins combined don't make up 5EH of it, so even if they were 100% more profitable only 5EH would have migrated before we reach to an equilibrium of profitability across all SHA256 coins.
These profitability swings happen all time, coins are never equally profitable but usually, the difference isn't worth the switch, but when an altcoin price does 50% to the upside when and if bitcoin has not moved up as much, that coin will be a lot more profitable to mine for as long as the hashrate on that coin doesn't spike to utilize the price increment.
So if you want to catch those spikes it has to be automated, mining pools like Viabtc offer what's called Smart-Mining where they will use your hashrate to mine the most profitable SHA256 coin and then convert your payout to BTC if you set the auto-conversion on, eventually (just like the other day) you end up with 25% more bitcoin mining BCH and converting it to BTC as opposed to directly mining bitcoin.
Phill, sorry about what happened, I know you were not off-topic, I also think the majority of the community would agree to that, I dislike the forks of bitcoin just as much if not more than anyone else, but luckily I am opened minded enough to understand that mining is about profitability and profitability of SHA256 mining takes ALL SHA256 coins into account, the notion of not talking about altcoins profitability and how they affect bitcoin mining difficulty is flawed, it's like saying "don't mention the price of bitcoin in dollars because this is a BTC only section, take the fiat discussion to another section".