Everyone seems to have forgotten about the most important piece of our Bitcoin puzzle: The miners.

They are the guardians of the blockchain, and really a shortage of miners can terribly affect price of Bitcoin. Let's see how.

Miners mostly rely on their earnings from their mining activity to live and carry out general life stuff. Mining is a full time job at this point, as hobby mining has already been phased out long, long ago.

Since the miners rely on something that changes price multiple times a day, their income isn't fixed like other regular jobs. So important decisions (like halvings, and we'd get to that) affect miners positively or negatively.

For instance, many miners who were just above break even were totally phased out last week when the difficulty increased by 9%. They were phased out because their computers couldn't keep up well enough to keep turning that small profit they were living on.

Given that most mining is centralised at this point, it would be a dangerous thing for all the other single miners to get phased out. This would put the fate of Bitcoin into the hands of corporations. And guess who controls corporations? That's right, the government.

Should all the smaller miners get phased out due to certain factors (like the recent drop in price), it could lead to the total centralisation of bitcoin. The biggest irony of all.

So how about the halving?

Many miners were skeptical about if they would continue mining post halving. And why wouldn't they be? Their rewards would be cut in half.

But that was when Bitcoin was trading around $9k. Now that Bitcoin is around $5k, cutting those rewards in half, after they have already been cut in half is a little too much. The cost of running the equipment hasn't changed in value, but the price of their rewards(which will be cut in half by the way) has drastically changed. This is the literal definition of their backs being against the wall, and they'd have to fall out.

Except a miracle can happen on crypto street to bring the price back to the 9k range, we can say bye to a major part of Bitcoin's decentralisation.

The corporations on the other hand don't really have a problem. They don't mine bitcoin as a way of life, so prices don't really affect them. It's the amount of the mining network that they control that they're after.

There are also single miners or mining pools that don't mine as a full time job either. They also have jobs, and if they are more focused on in reading the amount of bitcoin in their stash over the price, then we can have a small argument over losing the decentralisation.

Should that not be the case though, we're in for a real ride. Only time would tell.