Who will be bothered to mine and secure the network if they can get crapload of coins for free?
who will mine after they spent all their fiat on an IPO?
When a lot of coins are given away for free, their value is close to zero. So mining it won't pay the electricity, you're paying fiat to mine it.
When there is an IPO, i.e. people pay for the coins, therefor the value of the coins is higher, and mining it can actually pay for the electricity.
the point is, ppl should mine based on the merits of the tech. if there is merit, i could argue they'd be more likely to mine aether since their sunk cost is 0 from the free distribution.
Sure, a few enthusiasts will do that. But the large farms won't, so the network hashrate will be very low and susceptible to attacks making it an unsafe investment.
as a miner, i can tell you that all miners don't necessarily mine efficiently. i mine for speculative reasons; mainly to hold coin for future appreciation even if electricity costs result in losses in the short term. this strategy has worked out well for me with Bitcoin.
if aether prices are low and results in low difficulty, fine, i'll just mine more aether than i would otherwise. but i would only mine if i thought there was merit to aetherium or etherium (they being functionally equivalent).
