> Nobody will pay $1 for electricity to generate <$1 of bitcoin.
Nobody would willingly, deliberately do so. There are plenty of cases of cryptocurrency mining software being installed on unsuspecting users' machines, causing them to spend a large amount of energy generating a tiny amount of Bitcoin/Litecoin/whatever that gets sent to the attackers.
Notably, this has happened to a number of EC2 customers. If you accidentally leak your AWS secret key (by unwisely checking it into version control, or through a buggy deployment process, for example) then more likely than not, you'll very quickly find your account being used to spin up a bunch of expensive GPU instances.
True -- but completely irrelevant to my point that even if every single coin that was mined was immediately sold, the limit would be the supply of new bitcoins which is by design lower than that of other currencies like dollars/euros.
Nobody would willingly, deliberately do so. There are plenty of cases of cryptocurrency mining software being installed on unsuspecting users' machines, causing them to spend a large amount of energy generating a tiny amount of Bitcoin/Litecoin/whatever that gets sent to the attackers.
Notably, this has happened to a number of EC2 customers. If you accidentally leak your AWS secret key (by unwisely checking it into version control, or through a buggy deployment process, for example) then more likely than not, you'll very quickly find your account being used to spin up a bunch of expensive GPU instances.