Thank you for your investigation and the clear findings.
At your finding, you mentioned that it is important to consider the supply of bitcoin. In my opinion, the supply side of bitcoin might not be that much important. It is all because of the minner cannot obtain an enormous amount of BTC in a short period of time, so the supply should increase rapidly.
So, should we only add demand side information when we are prediccting the trend?
What do you think?
Although the overall mining difficulty must go up, I think that in short term (say 4 - 5 days), the movement of mining volume / difficulty can share information about recent market sentiment.
I believe that miner is a mature participant in the market, thus their movement is somehow important to understand the market.
Actually I had plot a correlation graph and interestingly, the price (tomorrow) is quite correlated to mining volume (today).
So I will dig deeper in this area. Stay Tuned!