the final difficulty adjustment of 2018 just happened. and so now we are in the realm of mining pools knowing the next difficulty jump WILL be affected by the delivery of next gen asics getting delivered in a week to thousands of people.
pushing up hashrate. pushing up costs. and therefore making many prefer to buy coin as a cheaper option, sparking a price rise
Interesting. However, many have claimed that 6000$ was the bottom because it was close to the mining costs. (I didn't agree back then, I claimed the mining costs are not so well known.)
We are still under 4000$, so either miners are mining at a loss and still don't care, either the mining cost was close to 3000$-3500$.
Only in this case your theory could be correct, although historically (eg when Bitcoin has fallen under 250$ in 2015 and stayed low for almost a year) the price has its periods when it was clearly under the mining costs.
PRICE is not the underlying value
first 3 quarters of 2018 $5800 was a good measure.. then in october hashrate curved down. and then price curved down in november.
in 2015
the hashrate was between 250peta-400petahash during the stagnant period which doing math of asics at the time... it was break even/profitable there was a bit in august 2015 which touched on the break-even testing the bottomline.. then by autumn the hashrate and the market price moved up