I've always said bitcoin miners are the Real Men of bitcoin. It's fun keeping up with them. Most of this report is paywalled, but I was mostly looking for what the author meant by hashcost.
Hashprice is the go-to metric for miners as it represents the revenue generated per unit of hashrate, typically measured in USD per TH/s or PH/s per day. Hashprice is a function of Bitcoin price, network difficulty, block subsidy and transaction fees. This metric allows miners to assess the revenue of their operations against fluctuating Bitcoin prices, tx fees and network difficulty, without having to make complex calculations. Bitcoin’s hashprice changes with every new block added to the blockchain. Most platforms use a lagging Simple Moving Average (SMA) to account for transaction fees.In response to hashprice, hashcost emerged as a metric reflecting the operational costs associated with mining, enabling miners to evaluate their profit margins easily and make informed decisions about their mining strategies. The concept of hashcost was introduced and refined by mining analysts and platforms that aimed to provide a clearer understanding of operational expenses in relation to miner earnings.
Basically, while hashprice is what miners are paid per unit of hash, hashcost is what it cost miners to produce that unit of hash. To be profitable they want hashprice > hashcost.