Alright, so I've been wondering... when miners solve those puzzles and get their bitcoins as rewards, how exactly do those coins end up in the hands of the public? Like, how can we actually buy those newly mined bitcoins? And what keeps the miners from just holding onto them and not selling at all?
at this stage it no longer matters. miners do not mine much. over 19 million coins are out there.
the answer to your question is:
most Miners can not afford to mine and hodl 100% of their coins.
If all gear is s21 it earns 9 dollars a day and burns 90 kwatts so if all miners are 4 cent watt cost they burn $3.60
so 9.00-3.60 = 5.40 per unit profit
they need sell at least 3.60/9.00 or 40% of the coins they mine.
So at least 40% go back to market
Just how you purchase any other goods that are produced by someone, if the miners decide to sell they will either use a CEX or an OTC deal and people will buy those coins, just as everyone buys theirs.
Theoretically nothing, but in reality bills, to keep mining you need to pay for electricity, maintenance, rent, and so on, you can't have the cake and eat it too, that is unless you have already a bag of unlimited cash set aside that you use to pay for those.
How does newly mined gold enters circulation? The miners sell it to gold companies, or over-the-counter in a face-to-face trade, or even rarely hoard the gold.
Nothing! Take a look on the first 10 thousand coinbase transactions. Most of them are unspent. So, it can happen, but miners usually have to pay electricity etc.. So they do not hoard them indefinitely.
Just like your or my bitcoins come into public circulation. They sell the coins on the open market. You can trace blockchain transactions. Some of the mined coins will sooner or later reach the well-known exchange wallets.
There is nothing stopping them, but what would be their incentive to do so? Bitcoin mining is not a cheap sport nowadays. They have bills to pay, just like everyone else.
Of course, what prevents miners from selling Bitcoin is that miners believe that the value of Bitcoin will continue to increase in the future, so they choose to keep it as a valuable asset.
Additionally, miners may want to hold Bitcoin as a reserve or collateral for the future.
Like people who save gold, of course they also mine because they have the belief that one day its value will definitely increase.
If there were 10 miners, then an agreement could be reached, but there are a lot of Bitcoin miners and they are located in different parts of the world, so agreement is impossible.
And my colleagues correctly said that 19 million coins out of 21 have already been mined.