Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The current bubble is definitely over though Why do you say “over”? I see BTC reaching $20k this summer and then falling to <$10k as miners fold.
Why would miners folding cause Bitcoin to drop in value? The same amount of Bitcoin will be mined no matter what.
These past years the Bitcoin ASICs have been tremendously profitable, and as a result the demand for the hardware goes up, leading to huge profits for the hardware makers. These past few months have seen a drop in Bitcoin, which drops the profit for miners, but as it is still above electricity prices, only results in cheaper hardware.
If Bitcoin drops below the electricity line, you will see miners all over the world start to turn off their devices. And once that happens, block time will rise, and that will start making the entire network less trusting. This will cause a spike of people selling their coins, and with less blocks this means a packed exit. With the packed exit, you would think this would incentivize mining as transaction fees go way up, but those fees come directly from the value of the coin, so once this starts the value of the coin is going to drop heavily.
With mining profitability dropping the further this goes, the longer block times, the more the price of Bitcoin goes down. If Bitcoin goes below 10k quick enough, it won't ever see another difficulty adjustment, and the entire chain dies. The developers might chose to hard-fork and change the difficulty changes algorithm, but as we've seen with Bitcoin Cash, these changes are political and don't tend to end well.