The cost of mining absolutely factors in to the willingness of miners to sell. Any miner at scale who sold at a loss consistently would be bankrupted in short order, and cease to be a miner.
The exceptions to that logic are: (1) anomalously low cost miners, and (2) enthusiast miners. But while (2) may continue to mine when price is low, they have no motivation to sell.
(1) might be substantially composed of botnets. But mining XMR with a botnet is like giving away half of your profits, because other coins are twice the yield right now. It makes no sense to me. I admit the point that switching a botnet to another coin is (1) a c&c risk, and (2) a slow process, like turning an aircraft carrier, but at this point you'd have to be lazy and dumb not to be mining vertcoin or something else with a substantially higher yield. This condition has dragged on for more than a week now.
I don't think more than 25% of mined coins are being sold now, probably less each day. Unfortunately I don't know of a way to determine the actual number because of the privacy design. If anyone has a model that would allow to estimate the number of coins being added to supply each day, or access to exchange data regarding coin flow, I would love to hear about it.
I am utterly amazed that we can maintain nearly 1GH (the equivalent of about 10,000 desktops, or 5,000 desktops and 2,000 GPUs) of what must be, at this point, almost entirely enthusiast hashing.
Given that no more than 5500 xmr are being sold at 0028, that's only 15 btc/diem of burn. There are 230 btc of bid on plx alone. This is bullish as f*ck.
One way my analysis could be wrong big-time: If most of the hash is botnet, and the controller(s) are big XMR holders, not just dumpers, they might withhold as much as they can without crimping their lifestyle, in expectation of higher future prices. That makes them more like enthusiasts than scale miners, in their behaviour. But if this were true, why have they dumped so low? I have to think that the hash is mostly not botnet, and the botnets were dumping while they were large in the hash, but now represent either holders or a much smaller proportion of the hash than they did previously.