You missed my entire point, perhaps because the electricity bit wasn't really relevant and I should've left it out.

Say there's $100 today, and the max you can mine is $1 worth of coin per year. Even if it cost you a billion to mine that $1 coin, the worst that could happen is that you sell the $1 immediately to recoup your costs (as you said).

Alright fine so the max extra supply is just $1. That doesn't depress the price much, it's just 1% inflation.

And if you look at bitcoin, by design, those numbers are such that inflation goes to 0% over time, and drops below currencies like the dollar or euro or any other fiat one really, not far from now.

In other words, there's no real worry of price depression linked to electricity.

The reason I mentioned it is because if we assume you can gain $1, we must assume that people will spend up to $1 to make it. Even if you could make $1 of bitcoin with 1 penny of electricity today, over time competition would drive that to $1. It's totally expected and part of bitcoin's design. Saying 'if electricity wasn't too bad' like you do, implies that its price has anything to do with anything. It doesn't. Miners compete in a zero sum game, so they'll expend as much energy up to the price of a single bitcoin. (some foolish miners go a bit above, as in any market where poorly informed actors make bad buying decisions, but the market in general is expected to go up to the price of bitcoin in hardware+electricity expenses).

Beyond that, even if electricity prices are 0 or 1 billion, we expect miners to sell. At least in general, in a rational market. After all, if miners hold on to coin because they expect a price increase, they would do so regardless of whether they mined the coin, or simply bought it. Holding coin as an investment is a decision that is mostly (though not completely) separate from mining. It's true there is more pressure to sell if cashflow is tight due to tight margins, but this doesn't magically increase average long-term supply beyond the inflation rate of bitcoin, which is fixed, only whether there are spikes in supply in the short term from a buildup of unsold mined supply (of which you could say, would've been bought and held anyway if this particular miner was interested in holding as an investment).

Which adds to the argument that electricity costs don't play a huge role in whether the price gets depressed or not on average over the long term, it simply always does, up to the point of the money supply, which is fixed by design and designed to go to 0%.

The most electricity prices can do is direct the moment that new supply that's already been created is unleashed on the market. But unleashed it will, anyway, it's already in the market and in the hands of people who may choose to keep it as opposed to sell it. But as any market, especially relatively efficient ones like a global bitcoin trade, mining costs will approach mining revenues, leading most miners to sell immediately, which leads to relatively stable downward pressure at the rate of inflation of the money supply which again, is set to go to 0%. it's actually relatively high today (like 10%ish), but when talking about bitcoin in a longer term context, is set to disappear essentially.

At the end of the day miners do not control supply with electricity prices. They're simply the first 'buyer' of bitcoin's fixed supply (fixed, whatever electricity prices are) and buy this coin with electricity-dollars. When or how much of this they sell later, then, has very little to do with downward pressure. The downard pressure originates from the fixed supply of bitcoin whether electricity is cheap or expensive, it doesn't matter.