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You're implicitly assuming that bitcoin will retain value. If the value of bitcoin halves every 6 months and the cost of mining halves every 7 months, bitcoin will never* be worth mining again.

* Of course it wouldn't be a smooth decline so there may be short periods where it occasionally becomes viable.

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Where is the author pulling their mining costs from? I'd love to see their source. Mining costs are mostly concentrated in purchasing the equipment and setting up a factory. Once that's done, your day to day expenses are electricity and labor.

Many of the biggest Bitcoin mining operations are in places like China, near hydro-electric dams, where the electricity cost is extremely low. Labor is also cheap. Since they've already paid the setup costs, they are not going to be shutting down even at $1000 BTC.

There have already been hash rate wars. BCH has tried sending BTC into a death spiral before, by luring over miners to their blockchain. It worked, for a bit. Eventually, transaction fees went up on BTC, and miners were incentivized to return to BTC.

The average block time is 10 minutes for Bitcoin. Hash rate adjusts every 2016 blocks. That's 14 days on average. If the hash rate dropped 50%, it's 28 days.

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