Maybe I’m remembering this wrong, but isn’t block difficulty adjusted depending on how much computing is thrown at the blockchain? Which means the incentive for miners would be, uh, just power through and hope your competitors fold before you do? Like the car scene in Rebel Without a Cause but boring and stupid.
Yeah, and even worse for bitcoin, when all the miner competitors fold (and the block difficulty goes down) the old mining equipment still exists. So this could be cheaply gotten by bad(er) faith people who want to fuck with the mining (for which you wouldn’t need to run the rigs constantly, or in the case of some bad faith miners they are not really bound that much by budgets). Of course the utility of this is a bit low, as most you can do (I think) is disrupt parts of network for a while (which could open up some financial fraud things) but still, if I was a state looking to disrupt crypto because some of my enemies are using it, getting large mining capacity at pennies for the dollar would be a potential move (I don’t think states actually see crypto at large as a threat to anything btw, which if I was a diehard gold standard anti state cypherpunk crypto bro would make me worry).
I do wonder if the price of mining will eventually fall so low that only state backed miners or fraudulent miners can still mine (mining is easy if you don’t pay for your power).
yep! bitcoin is literally anti-efficient
It’s very efficient for the people selling energy and mining equipment
No need to worry about inflation if you can’t print more money /s
Lmao.
I think that’s literally the reason they designed it this way lol. At least it’s been the line from as far back as I remember. Because we all know inflation is bad, so surely a strongly deflationary currency must be really good!!! It’s just free value!!!
“If inflation is bad, deflation must be good” was a notion I had when I was like 12, my dad (an economist) swiftly disabused me of that notion.
I think there’s a (deliberate?) confusion about the interwar years. People know 2 things:
- the Great Depression
- hyperinflation in Wiemar Germany
They think those are connected (they are, kinda) and think that inflation caused the great Depression, when in fact it was characterized by deflation.
Back in the early days of Bitcoin there was this weird Mellon-esque view that debt==bad and that a deflationary economy would encourage savings. This is one of the many ways that Austrian economics is childish and shallow.
Another thing I’ve had thought about - if the gold standard is so superior, why doesn’t a country base its currency on it and outcompete everyone else? If you ask that you’ll inevitably get conspiracy theories about how (((they))) won’d allow it.
