You can most certainly up your price. The only question is how the market responds.
Miners have zero incentive to sell their bitcoins for less than the cost of producing them. Left to themselves, the price should approach the minimum cost of producing bitcoins (since they do have incentive to undercut each other as much as possible).
Speculators could respond to a price increase by miners by dumping their inventory on the market somewhere between the old break-even mining price and the new break-even mining price, undercutting the miners and lowering the price. This would go on until either the speculators exhausted their supply of cheap bitcoins, or the miners were all driven out of business.
The real question is how the supply of the miners compares to the supply of the (active) speculators. If the miners are the principal supply of new bitcoins, and speculators are by and large just holding their bitcoins until some future time when the price is even higher, then the miners could totally up the global price by upping their own prices.
I think the parent meant that miners have zero incentive to produce bitcoins if they can't sell them for at least the production costs. Even if they sunk a big pile of money into their mining rigs, if they can't sell the coins for the marginal cost of producing them, continuing to mine is just throwing good money after bad.
Yeah, the word for businessmen who sell goods at less than the cost to produce them is "bankrupt". I don't doubt more than a few miners have lost quite a bit of money selling below cost -- probably most without realizing it -- but I have to assume they have all been weeded out by now, given the notorious fierceness of the mining world. Selling BTC below cost might help stave off bankruptcy for one billing cycle, but on the next you'll be deeper in the hole than you were before.
If selling under cost makes the difference between being $10000 in debt and $1000 in debt then it matters. The latter is much easier to deal with on a personal level, because individuals tend to have support networks / savings.
I'm guessing here, but I think mining is currently on the level of individuals and not corporations.
I was talking more about depreciation of capex than marginal cost. Almost all ASIC owners are facing losses and some of them are inventing rationalizations like the idea that they can force the price up by not selling (even though the price cannot affect the mine vs. buy tradeoff).
That's true, they're now worse.
They are now a patent troll both directly (with the money they are demanding, and getting, from Android manufacturers) and indirectly (see link to bloomberg below) and engage heavily in astroturfing (which this article smells of... also see the readwrite link below) and attack ads (scroogle, droid rage, everything Mark Penn). On top of that it looks enough like they are closing their platform that Valve has jumped ship to hedge against MS forcing them through the MS app store where they can take a cut.
I miss the feature of Novell Netware that used to let you type
cd ...
to go up two levels, or analogously for as many dots as you needed. It was incredibly useful and fast. Thanks for the tip, and I'm using these aliases from now on.
