Are these sharp declines that follow a very predictable event revealing that the mining market is in fact dominated by lots of smaller players which are operating on the edge of insolvency?
Highly doubting this and for two reasons.
One is the small players dominating the market, of course, it will be the question of what means a "small" player, 100Th, 1Ph, 10Ph? 10 Ph at these prices means either ~700 S9 worth 70k now or 700k a year ago, or 100 S19 worth 300k, would this be the entry-level for small players, then what is the level for the medium or large players? They might have a serious piece of the current hash rate but I doubt they are even close to "dominating" the market.
The second one is the "insolvency" part. Again, this might be true for large scale farming, there are probably quite a few cases when they took loans for their gear but "insolvency" for small farms? Nope, I don't see that as anything significative, most would have avoided taken loans and even if they would have tried taken that path I doubt they would have been able to settle one with their banks, it's a pain in the ass to take a loan or extend a credit line for us here for a business that has been operating for 15 years that has assets and stuff, but for crypto mining? Neah, I can't imagine anything like this, this is where drilling for shale and bitcoin mining go their separate routes.
