If gold goes to $1M/oz would mining companies dig as fast as they can and create more daily supply? If BTC goes to $1M can they mine more daily?

bad analogy

there's about 300k metric tons of gold on this planet

245k has already been mined and is in circulation and suffers shrinkage each year due to being lost, shavings - a major reason why they had to constantly re-mint coinage in the ancient world was that over time gold coins would lose mass

you put ten 1g gold coins in a purse for a month and by the time you go to spend them they are each now about .99g because micro shavings came off it

the 50k or so unmined tons are not efficient at all to mine, there are no more veins of gold remaining the only gold left is in the form of dust

the dust is loaded into trucks like this


it then goes through a number of processes to extract the gold - all of which are quite laborious and expensive and very, very bad for the environment with all the chemicals used such as cyanide - I've visited gold mines in colorado when i was studying geology, it's a sight to behold as truck after truck ferries the dirt (this is where the phrase paydirt comes from) to the processing center and those gigantic dump trucks which could carry an entire house will only get a few grams of gold per load

if the price of gold were to 100x then perhaps a few locations which are not profitable because one load of dirt only yields half a gram instead of the 3-4 grams needed to break even currently but the supply of gold is not going to suddenly explode and eventually, just like with bitcoin shrinkage will outpace new supply

btc's limited supply is known and should be baked in. perfectly inelastic supply is a great-but-not-fully-sufficient aspect of hard currencies. if it were, limited edition princess diana beanie babies would be the **** and my sister would be a billionaire.

gold is harder than btc, imo, because of relative confiscation risk. i can't imagine a world in which the US government (much less rest of world govts) bans gold, given it's been around forever, has industrial uses, the treasury owns half a trilly, etc.

seems more likely (albeit remote) scenario where btc poses legitimate threat to global financial order, -- especially the dollar -- and political machinery demonizes it as a ponzi that benefits select few cryptobros at the expense of everyday americans. sprinkle in a few anecdotes about btc funding illicit drugs/arms trades, that transaction fees make it prohibitively expensive as an actual currency, energy costs to mine (GLOBAL WARMING) and you could get sufficient support to ban possession. in that scenario US-facing brokerages (and btc itself) would be cooked. btc ownership is also more traceable.

this is a simple framing assuming nationalist rules apply going forward rather than techy-madmax or utopian future states.

disclaimer: i'm btc agnostic and can easily see it 10x in coming years so don't stone me

How are people handling half of their bitcoins being gone? There's probably a lot of new market participants unprepared for this.