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Alsadius comments on Why you should consider buying Bitcoin right now (Jan 2015) if you have high risk tolerance - Less Wrong Discussion
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Mining doesn't impose any sort of cap on prices in the traditional sense. High prices lead to more mining activity, but more mining activity doesn't change the creation rate, it just spreads the proceeds of creation out over more miners. If BTC doubles in price, but the miners double in quantity, then mining is exactly as profitable as it was before. If BTC halves in price, and half the miners shut off their rigs, ditto.
It doesn't necessarily do that either. The more mining gets specialized, the more centralization we see.
Fair. For added precision, "spreads the process of creation out over more dollars worth of mining equipment".
The proceeds overwhelmingly don't go to miners. They go to electricity utilities and the upstream value chain of those businesses. Because the cost of electricity is always nearly identical to the proceeds. Basically, bitcoin is a way to turn perfectly good dollars into an extra load on the grid for no good reason.
I have a friend who mines bitcoin...but only in the winter, because he has electrical heating anyways, so there's no net new electrical load.