Post
Topic
Board Altcoin Discussion
Re: IOTA - Permissioned ledger Russian extortion scheme
by
r0ach
on 31/03/2016, 19:04:24 UTC
Most people don't even realize Bitcoin has it's own decentralized exchange, but it does.

Which only 0.001% of the population can participate in profitably. And it ceases roughly 2033 or unless transaction fees scale up but there is a Tragedy of the Commons dilemma there as well.

It doesn't really even matter if it's profitable or not.  You can define Bitcoin in one sentence:

The purpose of mining is to create a permanent two way peg, decentralized exchange, which thus results in a permissionless system.

The economic incentives are a side issue, but seem to work thus far.  It's designed to bounce back and forth between profitable and unprofitable.  The fact that it's deflationary creates a time opportunity cost reward to generally remain profitable over the long haul.

You missed the point entirely. Only 0.001% have the economies-of-scale to mine Bitcoin profitably. Sorry your argument fails on the economics of proof-of-work hash functions, unless you can argue there is one that can't be significantly optimized for an ASIC and economies-of-scale for cheaper electricity located next to utility scale hydropower (even free electricity perhaps if you do a handshake and wink in China with a Communist Party official).

It's just an externality that can change at any given time.  I guess it's only a problem if you for some reason believe sha256 will not be commoditized.  The fact that energy costs keep becoming an ever higher percentage of the price per Bitcoin instead of hardware seems like it won't be a problem.