Price vs Difficulty Patterns in POW coins

It is always interesting to study the Price/Difficulty correlation of POW coins, as it represents a significant factor of its future price. Back in November 2017, I wrote:

Another interesting fact is that difficulty is not always 100% related to price. Sometimes price will jump so fast that it will take some time for difficulty to catch up, other times the price drop will be subtle but the difficulty drop will be steep, thus making the coin attractive for miners.
Source

As this is true for brief periods of time, the correlation between Difficulty and Price also tends to find balance periods.

Understanding those periods could tell us where the price is going. Lets take the Ethereum Classic four month chart as an example:

In the graph above you can see that the price and difficulty of Ethereum Classic tends to follow a similar pattern, only broken by external events. One could argue that the blue circle period was marked by the last cryptocurrency pump and the diversity of profitable GPU coins to mine; while the red circle is being determined by the current Bitcoin crash. However, the price and difficulty lines should correct these gaps in the near future.

To help us understand the rules of this correlation, lets remember the principles of "Mining Difficulty":

The difficulty raises as more hashing power is added to the network, this happens when a currency becomes attractive in price. In the same way, as the price drops, miners are forced to switch to more profitable coins or shut down their operations.

One could also look at the difficulty line as the cost of producing the coin. Like in any other industry, if production costs are up and the price of the product is down, manufacturers will look for other alternatives or they will simply shut down their business.

So what does the graph tell us about ETC

We can conclude from the ETC chart that when the Bitcoin market settles, its price should raise and its difficulty should fall until they have their next Balance Period.

It could be a good bet to buy some ETC for some short term gains.