Quote from: tacotime on November 03, 2013, 04:27:06 PM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on November 03, 2013, 04:10:41 PM

Quote from: tacotime on November 03, 2013, 04:07:30 PM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on November 03, 2013, 04:01:04 PM

Quote from: tacotime on November 02, 2013, 07:06:57 PM

Quote from: usahero on November 02, 2013, 07:05:05 PM

The price is the result of supply&demand equilibrium, and not result of electricity wasted.

The price is always the result of supply and demand equilibrium -- but you don't think the cost of production plays into the quantities of a commodity that people are willing to sell for a given price (supply)?

No. If it was then GPU miners would simply keep mining and sell their coins for $800 per BTC. Miners have almost no pricing power. If difficulty gets too high relative to price then some miners will quit and difficulty will go back down.

Uh...? You don't think the boom in the beginning of the year had anything to do at all with ASICminer and Avalon suddenly controlling almost all of the newly generated BTC supply?

No. Correlation is not causation. Why would Avalon miners not sell coins at a higher rate than GPU miners? The number of miners is irrelevant the amount of production remains the same. If anything the continually rising hashrate means that production is about 30% higher than the target. Still the amount of coins relative to daily trading volume is a small fraction (and shrinking).

Because if you don't sell the coins, you constrict the supply entering exchanges, thereby disrupting supply-demand equilibrium and pushing price up? The volume of coins traded daily on an exchange is small compared to the total supply of coins.

You haven't proven that ASIC Miners withold coins at a higher rate than GPU miners did. I mined with GPU for 18 months and sold less than 10% of my coins to cover electrical costs. Still while daily volume may be lower than total supply it is much larger than the rate of NEW production. New ASIC miners don't "own" the complete supply they only "own" the newly created coins which is a tiny portion of the market now. It was different in 2010 when the daily production was sometimes more than daily exchange volume but those days are gone.