Quote from: Come-from-Beyond on January 04, 2015, 11:03:02 AM

Quote from: adam3us on January 04, 2015, 10:53:53 AM

That really is bitcoinium and that has amazing implications...

...which would be more amazing if bitcoinium was mined via useful PoW (like protein folding). And if it is then mining of bitcoinium may become more profitable than bitcoinium itself, which in turn will drive value of bitcoinium to zero (we don't value by-products much).

If its useful like sellable as a service, then that acts just like Adam Chirilluc cup of tea:

Quote from: adam3us

Heating your cup of tea with a resistive heating element satisfies none of those properties. (Yes you could heat your tea on top of a stack of ASICs, and maybe someday people will do that; but the extent to which you extract use from the waste heat causes the average cost of production to fall and hence difficulty to rise to compensate).

an oversupply of the service will cause its price to fall also, and we'll still have the exact same Joules spent on bitcoin mining (minus the revenue from providing the service). Bitcoin price is set by people investing in it and utility demand. Production cost follows that, not the reverse, otherwise we wouldnt have difficulty falls as we saw last month.

There's an economic principle that if a commodity is producible at below par, people will expend more effort (ie the difficulty will go up). Paul Sztorc explains the economic theory better in this blog article: http://www.truthcoin.info/blog/pow-and-mining/

Adam