16 Oct
2013
16 Oct
'13
6:24 a.m.
On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 03:50:03PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:
Anarchism's a great thing, but if you're trying to run an actual economy, you need to make it workable for economic reasons, not just ideological ones. Now that mining takes actual work and non-trivial amounts of electricity, and there are enough bitcoins on the market that you can just buy them, people are only going to do it if they can make a profit.
Difficulty is adaptive, so it will go down if hash rate goes down. It's not a one-way ratchet.
(If the market gets big enough that there aren't enough bitcoins circulating to meet demand, the price goes up, and maybe mining becomes profitable again.)