Quote from: mikeymillie on September 22, 2014, 08:32:03 PM

Quote from: jjacob on September 21, 2014, 02:38:07 AM

Quote from: mikeymillie on September 20, 2014, 09:48:09 PM

"-Miners typically need to sell their coin immediately as they have invested in equipment that expects a return"

Can someone please clarify for me, in layman's terms, how the investment a miner makes to acquire a coin is any more at risk than the investment a trader makes to acquire a coin? Once the coin is in your wallet, the relative return on that coin, once sold, is identical for both cases isn't it?

Miner: Spent $10 on equipment costs, $90 on power and cooling, received one Bitcoin worth $100

Speculator: Spent $90 on some exchange, $10 on fees, received one Bitcoin worth $100

Why are these two individuals in any different situation once they have turned their non-coin assets into coin? Up until the moment the coin landed in their wallet, their pre-coin assets could have performed wildly different to each other. But once they have been converted to coin, they perform the same? Or am I making the mistake of thinking miners do not see themselves as speculators but as something like 'manufacturers' and are thus not using disposable risk capital to set up their operations?

Miners would like to continue mining and earn bitcoins. So their bills have to be paid out.

So do traders, I still do not see how a trader and a miner are in fundamentally different circumstances.
One buys bitcoins from an exchange in hopes of selling them for a profit.
The other buys bitcoins through a combination of a mining equipment company and the electric company, in hopes of selling them for a profit.

The responses I am getting so far seem to imply that miners live paycheck to paycheck (or bitcoin to bitcoin) and cannot afford to sit on even a single mined satoshi, but instead must immediately sell each one to pay their bills instead of waiting for a better price when a better price is likely to come. Do traders not have bills to pay as well? Their investment capital didn't come from nowhere either, and has to be replaced as well.

Also there are, what, like 60% of all mined bitcoins in the blockchain that have as of yet, no unspent outputs? Wouldn't this seem to be, in large part, the result of miners who are clearly not selling coins they mine right away? I don't think Satoshi and a few people who lost or forgot about their Bitcoin account for such a large figure.

Most of the mined bitcoin with no unspent outputs were mined in the days before pools. Even if a miner is to "save" his bitcoin the bitcoin he owns will likely have inputs that are not from block subsidies (they are from previous inputs)

I would think of it as the miners are being forced to buy a certain amount of bitcoin, more then they can afford to buy, so they need to sell some of it. For example, if a miner can only afford to spend $100 per month buying bitcoin but uses up $1,000 worth of electricity then he will need to sell at least $900 worth so he does not buy (on a net effect) more then he can afford