I've found the problematic passage in Satoshi's paper. From Section 4, 'Proof of Work':
"To compensate for increasing hardware speed and varying interest in running nodes over time,the proof-of-work difficulty is determined by a moving average targeting an average number of blocks per hour. If they're generated too fast, the difficulty increases."
So I ask, "What is 'too fast'?" What it means is that the algorithm tries to limit the rate of creation of bitcoins to a relatively constant value. At the time most people first read that paper, this might not have appeared like it was going to foment a problem. But, it should have been obvious to Satoshi that the adoption of a new digital currency isn't a linear process: Particularly in the early stages I would have anticipated that 'demand' for BTC would be some approximation of the square of the elapsed time, rather than the elapsed time. One user would likely 'create' other users at a relatively constant rate, meaning that the integral of xdx is (x**2). (disregarding the 1/2 factor...).
To limit the creation of bitcoins to a linear value amounts to throttling its potential, and that means a pressure for the value to go up, way up. That's great for the early adopters, whose early work is made far more valuable than it otherwise would have been. Doubtless Satoshi understood this. Doubtless Satoshi also understood how important it was for him to get together as much computing power as he could afford, at the beginning, because CPU power at that point was quite sufficient to mine bitcoin.
Jim Bell
From: David Vorick <david.vorick@gmail.com>
To: coderman <coderman@gmail.com>
Cc: "cypherpunks@cpunks.org" <cypherpunks@cpunks.org>
Sent: Monday, November 25, 2013 6:12 PM
Subject: Re: bitcoin as a global medium of exchange (was Re: Interesting take on Sanjuro's Assassination Market)
As I was telling Jayvan, the idea would be that early adopters use the currency for its inherent uses to them, as opposed to its speculative potential.
Right now, bitcoin is almost exclusively speculative. It's worth a lot of money because the value has been increasing consistently. That's tulipmania.
In a perfect world you would have some way to protect a currency against speculation. The volatility in bitcoin makes it less useful as a currency, therefore the speculation is damaging bitcoin.
I don't have a solution, and I'm not suggesting one, I'm merely suggesting that a solution might exist that would be a substantial improvement.
If bitcoin was based on something that had inherent value, say cloud storage, then a spike in value would be followed by a spike in the amount of storage being contributed to the network (bitcoin currently does this, a spike in price is followed by a spike in mining). The key here though is that the network would be protect from dramatic dips in value. When bitcoin drops in price, all of the abundant mining does nothing to save bitcoin, because the bitcoin mining doesn't actually add any value to the network. Nobody cares how many petaflops the network is pulling, because the petaflops can't be put to use somewhere else.
But if the mining was based on cloud storage, a dramatic drop in the price of the currency would result in a dramatic drop in the cost of storing data on the network. That's something that actually has use, and so people would let the price fall unreasonably low (instead they would find a way to make use of the cheap storage). This would allow the currency to ride arbitrary spikes in price while being protected against arbitrary drops in price.
Jim, the amount of mining being done on the bitcoin network has no impact on the price. The price might have an impact on the volume of mining, but because the mining is specific to the bitcoin network (double sha2 hashing or something like that) it can't be sold or used for other applications. Bitcoin mining is only good for bitcoin mining, which means the demand for the mining is exclusively based on value of the bitcoins being mined every day.