Causation Fallacy

There is a theory that mining "follows" price, or more specifically, reward value. The implication is that mining is slaved to price, lacking any input into coin utility.

Consider the miner who responds only to historical reward values. This person cannot be the first miner, because the reward has no historical value. No price can be established because no trades have occurred. The miner might have heard that a number of unconfirmed units bought a pizza, but maybe the same units are double-spent. He must anticipate a certain level of future net return on capital that is unknowable until it either materializes, or does not. This is the nature of entrepreneurial risk. The risk must be taken before the product can exist. One might believe that the risk can be shifted to the consumer, with advance ordering. But at that point the consumer has become the entrepreneur, providing the capital for, and assuming the risk of, production.

It is certainly possible for a miner to respond only to historical reward values once history has been established by someone else's risk-taking. But what is the time window and method of averaging that predicts future reward values? The unique ability to predict exchange prices would provide the miner unlimited riches. If it could be done generally, price would never change, as all potential changes would be discounted upon first minting. So either price changes unpredictably, or not at all. In other words, every miner faces the same situation as the first. Historical prices do not exist that can predict future prices.

Assuming a market average return on mining capital generally, both overestimation and underestimation of reward value imply loss in relation to the cost of capital. Given the nature of competition, profits and losses (above and below market returns on capital respectively) experience constant negative existential pressure. In other words, the market attempts to eliminate these errors. But given the unpredictable nature of price, it can never actually do so. Production never seeks demand that exists, which is inherently historical, it always seeks demand that it anticipates. Production continues to guess at future consumption and in doing so creates the opportunity for consumption.

Miners trade their capital for units of bitcoin. In doing so they are a fraction of the overall demand for bitcoin. Yet miners do not independently establish price. Their particular demand is no more impactful on price than is that of a non-miner with the same level of demand.

One could say that miners converge on a market return on capital and by anticipating highest possible fee values. But merchants similarly converge on a market return on miner capital by seeking the lowest fee value. However, miners must anticipate overall demand and risk mining before there can be any utility. So to the extent that there is any asymmetry, mining precedes transacting, just as all production must precede consumption. Assuming otherwise conflates the direction a market seeks with the manner in which it does so.