Preferences are different. If you ask the whole population I bet most would prefer to feel their money is safe rather than their transactions completely anonymous. I know I do and I'm quite ordinary It's a choice and compromise between two incompatible needs.

When your valuables are stolen we report it to the police, we have a legal system to investigate the crime and an enforcement system to correct unlawful behavior by criminals. Through this system we can reclaim the lost property from the thieves if they are tried and found guilty.

This is a basic function of a judicial system.

Bitcoin is so infuriating because we can follow the stolen money but not reclaim it. THAT is the biggest threat to Bitcoin. Humans hate loosing their property/valuables more than anything. There are ample evidence for this in studies of risk management. Any system where thieves can't be stopped will be abandoned. It's easy to forget the main reason banks were invented was to safe keep peoples savings. The loans etc which our economy is based upon today is a secondary invention by a banker who realized all that stored money could be working for himself.

If there was a cryptocurrency that was different from bitcoin, decentralized but nonanonomous, where the sender and receiver were publicly known or at least could be identified, where if someone stole your coins you could both identify the thief and reclaim your funds, people would choose that currency over BTC every time. Anarchy and total anonymousness is not the preferred lifestyle of the majority of the population is my guess. To be able to secure your property is more important. 

I tend to agree with Graou on this. Teminology is very important, for different reasons.

When I've held seminars to lawyers or other Bitcoin laymen I've found myself having to change the terminology to accurately describe the system.

A miner is not "mining bitcoin" its bookkeeping transactions. The reward is actually more like lottery tickets where every ten minutes a winner is found to have won 25 BTC. I often get questions about why then it has these gold digging metaphors. The problem is that nomenclature now is based on one single Bitcoin application, the virtual currency BTC, and thus when you try to move into other applications, like stocktrading, property shares or insurance, the words we use make no sense.

The second reason was formulated in an interview with Michael Jackson ex-COO at Skype http://cointelegraph.com/news/112572/skype-co-founder-and-ex-coo-people-need-to-speak-people-need-to-transact

He said on the lines of: If a technology looks like money, acts like money then it probably is money, and it will be treated by legislators like money. Shen Skype started they were very careful not to be called a digital phone service because phone companies were so regulated that it would have killed the app. The same goes for Bitcoin, it should never have been called a virtual currency, rather a decentralized ledger or transaction system. It transfers ownership of tokens in a ledger, not currency.

A large mining operation may be manufacturing their own miners and thus have a "purchase" cost for the miner that is a lot lower than the commercial product. They would also pay low energy cost by buying bulk (they are an energy company's best customer because the load is constant in contrast to other data centers) so they should get a good deal. Ergo cost for a commercial miner operation is quite a bit lower in short and long term compared to hobby mining.

A commercial miner has to report to authorities about the operation and profits and they need to lower the risk of price volatility. They can either sell the coins as they mine them, which would put pressure on the price, or they can lend the btc out if they believe this is a short term down and they want to own them long term. Either way they get a firm fiat value for their coins today that the tax authorities understand and can deal with and they can pay their utility bills.

So the OP has a point in my opinion. At what price is the equation sustainable?

Could it be any of the more commercial mining operations that don't want to liquidate their daily BTC in expectation of future rises but need to turn their mining earnings into fiatvaluation for taxation and corporate finance and tax reasons?