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Comment by jameslevy | Hacker News Reader

Is there speculation regarding what miners will do instead of mining Bitcoin? For example, mining another cryptocurrency instead of Bitcoin? This would seem to have implications for the mining power for these altcoins, and perhaps implications for their prices as a result. I haven't seen any discussion about this.

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It balances itself out. a portion of the miners leave making it proportionally more profitable for the remaining miners, or they upgrade to more efficient hardware reducing their power costs to mine the same amount of bitcoin, or the price doubles, or a combination of all of the above.

during some periods of time the price falls and it takes longer for all of that to happen, with existing miners being slowly replaced by more well capitalized miners

Sure, but presumably the miners leaving will still want to do something profitable with their mining equipment. I'd expect to see the hashrate increase for other PoW coins. Unless there's some reason for that not to happen.

There is a market for coins with the same hashing algorithm, specifically to attract miners that can't do anything on the bitcoin blockchain.

They are all useless and don't have exchange rates to justify the electricity cost. You can launch a new one given the assumption that this is many miner's first halving.

The price to yield to electrical cost market is pretty efficient, rarely a long lasting advantage there.

Bitcoin miners have asics built to crunch sha256. There's not many alternatives to mine.

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