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ETH is also dropping pretty sharply today, -30% over 24h, at $800 now.

Question for those who know: what is the current break even price for ETH miners using GPUs? At what point does one take that GTX 1070 rig and either sell the parts or move to another currency, given the current mining difficulty?

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Pretty much all the top 20-30 coins dropped by 20-40 percent this morning

any explanation why the price is so closely coupled?

Probably a few things:

1) Largest mining operations are mining multiple currencies

2) The initial "whales" of ethereum were BTC early adopters diversifying holdings

In general it seems the price of BTC is almost always a proxy for the rest of crypto, most likely because any crypto portfolio has a significant amount of BTC in it.

Faith in cryptos in general is founded on BTC. Also, almost all alt-coins are priced in BTC.

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