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Comment by lucasmullens | Hacker News Reader

> Miners don’t want to sell their freshly mined bitcoins, as this would risk crashing the price of bitcoin — so instead, they borrow against the bitcoins, and against their rigs, too!

Is that really true? Maybe for a large enough miner, but small miners aren't going to crash the price by selling. And if they knew it would crash, couldn't they just short the market before selling?

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If you sell a large quantity (whether regular selling or short selling), it will drive the price down. If you short sell before regular selling, it will drive the price down even before you start your regular selling. Any gain from short selling will be offset by the lower price you get from your regular selling.

Isn't the difficulty adjust so roughly the same amount of bitcoin is being mined regardless of the number of miners? So isn't there going to be an equivalent amount of bitcoin being dumped on the market, whether it's by one large farmer or several small farmers?

so,

1. the market is surprisingly thin, it doesn't take a lot of bitcoin to knock the price down - particularly with the shortage of retail dollars.

2. there's no such thing as "just short" in bitcoin, the venues for doing so are unregulated casinos with an extensive track record of just screwing their own customers over.

this is not an orderly or well-regulated market in any regard

Isn't shorting a market then taking actions which directly cause the market to crash illegal?

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