Quote from: Carlton Banks on November 13, 2017, 04:31:32 PM

So, why don't you tell us how low the hashrate should be to keep Bitcoin's blockchain sufficiently secure?

Only low enough to ensure that mining is profitable indefinitely, I'm not suggesting a specifically defined numerical hashrate, but a lot of these miners seem to be trying to make a quick buck. History is full of mineral commodity booms and busts, this is a digital mining boom that will bust. The argument that we need the current hashrate for security reasons is complete non-sense. BTC isn't going to be attacked even though we just lost 50% of the miners. No one has the hash power to attack it except the miners themselves, which would be suicide.

If this Chapman guy thinks BTC needs to be $300,000 in 2022 to make mining profitable, well he's wrong. If the price is only 10% of that, then 90% of the unprofitable miners will need to shutdown and the 10% that are left will be the profitable ones. I'm willing to bet BTC still won't be attackable at that hashrate.

Who knows what Bitmain will be shitting out and where Moore's Law will put us? For all we know, a profitable hash rate may be 100x higher that it is today.

Then again, maybe I'm being pessimistic about price and we may indeed be at $300,000 in a few years.

Quote from: Carlton Banks on November 13, 2017, 04:31:32 PM

I mean, what's the actual idea being proposed by the "hashrate is too high" contingent? Anything?

Just that we're in a mining bubble and the miners of today are likely to go bust in a few years as the block reward drops off and people switch to zero fee lightning.