Quote from: Heathrow on March 14, 2013, 11:18:49 AM

Quote from: hawkeye on March 14, 2013, 11:07:00 AM

The vast majority of the population never has any hope of mining ~~BTC's~~ gold. They don't have the necessary ~~tech~~ skills or the ~~tech~~ savvy.

Your substitution would hold up if we didn't need a lot of folks mining. You don't need a lot of people mining gold in order for gold to have value. But we do need a lot of people "mining" BTC in order for BTC to have value. If the blockchain doesn't get built, BTC has no value. So what's going to happen when their are only a few people building the blockchain? If only a few people are generating BTCs isn't that a problem?

You might respond, "If only a few people are mining gold, that's not a problem, because gold will still have value." But that response doesn't work. Gold will continue to have value whether or not anybody mines it. (Why? Who cares.) BTCs will have NO value unless the blockchain is stably built. The value of BTC requires their being a lot of "mining" (I use "mining" as shorthand for "helping build the blockchain"). When the vast majority of miners get cut out of business, what's going to happen to BTC?

your not seeing the entire picture.

There is a roughly the same amount of BTC mined each day. as long as it has value people will mine it. if the value is sufficiently high where someone can get the equipment to mine with and make a profit then people will do so. if the profit drops then a percent of people quit mining untill its profitable enough to sustain a profit for the remainder of those involved. also keep in mind the difficulty changes based on the network hash rate, so as people join and leave it will adjust accordingly.
if you dont get what im saying then try to spend some time thinking about it, those that mine understand this.

As far as what i see in bitcoin, i see the possibility of a future. one where i would be stupid to have not gotten involved with bitcoin. i dont plan to be those people that say "i wish i had bought stock in Microsoft, Google, Amazon etc".