I you refer to individual miners, I highly doubt they're rich people.

I know I did  ... but I'm still holding some which I bought waaaay up there... 

Hold it till your last fucking breath, lol

re: wild swings in hashrate--  I assume everyone has seen this article?

https://medium.com/@Mengerian/bringing-stability-to-bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-eae8def0efa4

I think it's a thoughtful and balanced perspective.

He links to Amaury's most recent post:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-ml/2017-August/000136.html

Amaury's point, in a nutshell, is that the difficulty swings we are seeing in Bitcoin Cash are nothing (relatively) compared to the general level of uncertainty we will see in the bitcoin network over the next 3 months. The difficulty swings are an inconvenience but don't threaten the fundamental underlying stability of Bitcoin Cash. If you want to remember how crazy things can get with Bitcoin, recall what happened in 2013... https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bitcoin-network-shaken-by-blockchain-fork-1363144448/

Anyways, the set of articles convinces me that (a) the difficulty swings were predicted by the Bitcoin Cash devs; (b) there are very smart people on Bitcoin Cash thinking about the difficulty problems and (c) it's nonfatal in the near term and (d) several potential ways to solve over the longer term.

The reason why I posted so much about BCH is because it is basically an attack on Bitcoin. Needed to call out the absurdity as I see it.
In 4 hours, BCH diff will go up 4x and blocks will take hours. If you want to move your BCH coins, move them now.

Bitcoin Cash difficulty already went way up close to 12 hours ago and hashrate dipped way down (as expected):
http://fork.lol/pow/hashrate

Currently, blocks are being mined approximately every 2 hours: https://www.blocktrail.com/BCC

What will happen next is that if there are fewer than 6 blocks mined in a 12-hour window (approximately-- see https://medium.com/@jimmysong/bitcoin-cash-difficulty-adjustments-2ec589099a8e for details), Bitcoin Cash will undergo an Emergency Difficulty Adjustment where the next block will then be 20% easier to mine. It will continue to do this until the difficulty is approximately proportional to that of Bitcoin (~$600/$4300), at which point each miner will decide that it's more profitable to mine Bitcoin Cash and will move hashpower there. This swing will continue to happen every 2016 blocks (which is the "normal" difficulty adjustment timeframe).

Interestingly, there is essentially no correlation between hashrate/confirmation times to Bitcoin Cash price... the most price breakout occurred while the hash rate dipped.

Now that is a very good observation, the relation between hash and price and do they track together.  Keep an eye on things this is getting interesting.

bids for BCC are @ $631 at time of post, while the BTC chain is more profitable and hash has moved to the BTC chain

The correlation between hashrate/confirmation times to Bitcoin Cash price is that when the blockchain stops moving so nobody can move coins to the exchanges to sell them then it is a good time for a pump.

what about traders? aren't a part of the equation as well?

I see, very interesting, indeed.