There seems to be tacit acceptance that bitcoin mining is only done for profit.  I mine at a profit, though it's miniscule.  But even if my mining was at a slight loss I'd continue to do so (my tolerance for loss == my tolerance for my wife nagging me about the electric bill    ).  I'm upgrading to ASIC even if I never make money on it.  I also run a full bitcoin node 24/7, both for the same reason--they're activities that contribute positively to the network.  There are other reasons too, mostly involving intense curiosity and fascination with numerous facets of the bitcoin ecosystem.

Now don't get me wrong:  I'm not knocking anyone's motivations. Whatever drives you is your thing and ultimately it still contributes to the network so there's no loss of respect from me.  I guess I'm mostly curious to know if there are others out there like me who don't care too terribly much about the balance sheet where mining is concerned.

Trying to understand how addnode logic works.  I know recent bitcoind uses DNS for bootstrap.  If one uses addnode to specify a host to connect to does bitcoind always try to connect to that host or does it only connect if the DNS bootstrap fails?  If there are multiple addnodes specified does it try them in order until it succeeds or does it always try all of them?  Thanks for your help.

Over time bitcoins will be lost, and by lost I mean forever.  Inevitably wallets will be corrupted or deleted and can't be recovered.  Inevitably someone with bitcoins will die and their heirs will not know how to recover them, if they know of the coins at all.  In theory this loss could add up significantly over a long period of time.  With the total number of bitcoins capped what are the implications?