Anyone have a chart comparing 2014 bear market difficulty to present day?
That's a hard chart to make meaningful. Different hardware availability, different hardware profitability, and different scales of mining companies. Too many variables really.
Anecdotally though, as a former miner from back then, I think this crash is a little bit deeper for miners (evidenced by the decreasing hash rate). I was mining back then and I was profitable until the second half of 2015 at which point I was mining at about break even for "electricity only" with $250 BTC. I was losing money on the facility costs and made no money for my time invested.
The operations now days are much larger with much larger fixed costs for facilities, loans and employees. $6000 was probably break even for them with the difficulty of a month ago. Now, difficulty is down ~20% and prices are down ~40%.
Every miner in the world is likely losing money now if they sell mining proceeds daily. Very few miners do that though. As a miner, you are a trader by default. Just like a farmer, you store your crops if you can and wait for the best time to sell. The longer these prices remain, the more miners will file for bankruptcy or sell their stash to cover basic necessities such as electricity and payroll.
With enough bankrupt miners, the difficulty should theoretically drop another 20% while prices stay ~$3500 to balance things out.
EDIT: The point though is that we are in the second half of 2015 if you are using mining difficulty/profitability as an indicator and comparing the last bear market to this one.
now the miners are shorting too.
https://news.bitcoin.com/chinese-miners-short-btc-markets-to-hedge-against-falling-prices/