Innovation. Even with 3-6% annual inflation, tech prices always come down. This isn't like Ford or Tesla where they make sure their costs are low BEFORE they start manufacture because time is worth so much more in the tech space and competition's rapidly executing ideas, so generally, you get maybe three months between the idea stage and tape-out, and then maybe a month or two after that before you need to start pushing product out the door or face having to redesign your obsolete scrap - and this isn't really something exclusive to ASICs. Everything in tech is rapidly advancing, far faster than could be negated by inflation or colluding competition. With that in mind, I read about Ford's aluminum F-150, and it's just.... that should've happened 10 years ago, because I'm not used to their shit-slow pace. They have an unbelievably slow marketplace. Most cars still use non-variable compressors for A/C. It's basically either on or off, and all that "waste cold" when you don't want it full-blast is ejected. There's almost nowhere else on Earth you can get away with wasting air conditioning but in the auto industry. -And it really did take the government stepping in with efficiency standards the market called unachievable for this to start changing - for variable compressors and aluminum bodies - which is infuriating as a libertarian. I mean, we might still not even have standard seat belts if Ralph Nader weren't such a pretentious dickhead.
Game consoles were very much subject to this from the late 80s to early aughts when the market was still competitive and new tech was rapidly being shoved out for use by hundreds of manufacturers - and just about anything could change the game. AMD's K6 was a game-changer, the ANTIC was a game-changer, Colecovision was even a game-changer. The original XBOX controller was a game-changer... Right? The environment's changed a good bit now, though... revolutionary and comeptitive design died out to mass producing 3-5 consoles seeing who can fit the most low-risk gimmicks into their products. -But even so, prices still don't generally increase because costs to manufacture come down after initial production as sub-component manufacturers figure out SOPs and come up with reliable logistics, which is then, in the spirit of capitalism, used against them by the mass producers to negotiate better prices with a lower margin for the manufacturer than they started with, and once this relationship's established, and there are more of these partnerships formed between companies, manufacturing processes start becoming more streamlined and less wasteful altogether, much of which can be carried over even when you're making something a little more dissimilar than similar, and I think that's a good part of the reason consoles are becoming indistinguishable from small-form computers.
... I think I've gotten off-topic.
Back to mining... -part of the issue, too, might just be that there are these self-identifying miners who don't want to give up the lifestyle, where maybe they have the knowledge to do something more complicated but would otherwise be limited to jobs they're uninterested in. Mining allows almost anyone with some computer-savvy to be their own boss, or at least be a kind of franchise owner. Maybe they think the issue's just that they need more energy-efficient hardware, or need to look into co-locating, perhaps even rent out a building near cheap hydro-power hundreds of miles out. --And this isn't that far-fetched, I think. When I was still insisting to myself that I wanted to mine, I was actually looking into old VFW, Elk, etc buildings where the members are all dying out and they're renting spaces of their often-quite-large premises at low rates so long as their activities aren't disrupted, and maybe I could negotiate a deal where I'd pay for electricity for the warmer 6 months, and they'd cover it in Winter (after all, I'd set up a couple box fans in the doorway dividing our parts of the building so they wouldn't need to turn on the heat to be comfortably warm, and keeping old people warm is always nice). -And I was looking into USB watchdogs, self-resetting circuit breakers, how I could use ZigBee to communicate to "slaves" without needing all the PCs directly connected to the Internet, and how I could configure CGRemote & CGWatcher to be able to have this productive lease contract hundreds of miles away without ever contributing any foot traffic so I could negotiate a better lease rate.
TL;DR - Price was previously in a bubble and mining was good. Mining is bad, now, but increased cost-efficiency and energy-efficiency are still going to create strong pressure for difficulty to increase. Bitmain and the other manufacturers don't give half a shit about price because a) they sold that risk to miners (worst-case scenario, everyone takes a 6-month vacation with full pay from the massive stash of money they've accumulated), and b) people are still going to insist on being miners, and they have increased incentive to buy new, cost-efficient ASICs now that their margins are negative or at least more slim. It's well-known that anyone banking on BTC price increasing would be far better served by just buying BTC and not fucking around trying to generate it through digital wizardry, but miners gonna mine, and I'm not sure there's anything wrong with wanting to be a digital wizard, anyway (digital wizard is a large step up from "computer whiz," at least). All that said, this doesn't mean price doesn't impact difficulty, and it's obvious by the slow-down in increase - but mining isn't dead by any stretch of the imagination.
