Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investors and miners

Actually, I’m not. If a Bitcoin is worth $60,000, then in an efficient market miners will spend just under $60,000 to get it.

Will some choose to keep the Bitcoin? Certainly. But, they still have to pay the bills. To do so they have a few options:

* Raise money from private investors or on the public markets. RIOT and MARA have done this. They pay their bills by selling shares.

* Loans. There are many ways for miners to put the Bitcoin up as collateral and get a loan, keeping the bitcoin

It turns out it doesn’t matter if the miners sell or not: both methods above involve getting an influx of money, either from equity or from lenders. All that matters for the analysis above is whether the market is efficient.

If the market isn’t efficient, and Bitcoin costs $20,000-$30,000 to mine, then my analysis falls apart. And you and I should start bitcoin mining companies to boot.

> They could very well be HODLErs buying at a huge discount.

See comment about efficient market above. There’s no discount. You could work a job, earn $60,000 and buy 1 bitcoin.

Or, you could take the $60,000, buy $60,000 worth of ASIC and coal and burn through it to mine 1 Bitcoin on average.

It works out the same, if market efficient

> Prices could be high, but mostly they weren’t. Although it’s true that the most expensive tulips of all cost around 5,000 guilders (the price of a well-appointed house), I was able to identify only 37 people who spent more than 300 guilders on bulbs, around the yearly wage of a master craftsman. Many tulips were far cheaper. With one or two exceptions, these top buyers came from the wealthy merchant class and were well able to afford the bulbs. Far from every chimneysweep or weaver being involved in the trade, the numbers were relatively small, mainly from the merchant and skilled artisan class – and many of the buyers and sellers were connected to each other by family, religion, or neighbourhood. Sellers mainly sold to people they knew.

> When the crash came, it was not because of naive and uninformed people entering the market, but probably through fears of oversupply and the unsustainability of the great price rise in the first five weeks of 1637. None of the bulbs were actually available – they were all planted in the ground – and no money would be exchanged until the bulbs could be handed over in May or June. So those who lost money in the February crash did so only notionally: they might not get paid later. Anyone who had both bought and sold a tulip on paper since the summer of 1636 had lost nothing. Only those waiting for payment were in trouble, and they were people able to bear the loss.

> No one drowned themselves in canals. I found not a single bankrupt in these years who could be identified as someone dealt the fatal financial blow by tulip mania. If tulip buyers and sellers appear in the bankruptcy records, it’s because they were buying houses and goods of other people who had gone bankrupt for some reason – they still had plenty of money to spend. The Dutch economy was left completely unaffected. The “government” (not a very useful term for the federal Dutch Republic) did not shut down the trade, and indeed reacted slowly and hesitantly to demands from some traders and city councils to resolve disputes. The provincial court of Holland suggested that people talk it out among themselves and try to stay out of the courts: no government regulation here.

[0]: https://theconversation.com/tulip-mania-the-classic-story-of...