Pedantic and irrelevant part of our discussion don't you agree? There is gold throughout the universe. And we are not close to tapping all the gold on earth. Mankind's technology for tapping gold on earth and throughout the universe will continue to improve. Malthusians always annoy me, because throughout the history of the world they have never been correct.
No I think it's very relevant to this discussion. Even if we get the ability to move gold to earth from other planets at a cost less than the worth of the gold, there's still a finite limit to how much we can bring to earth because there's a limit to how much we can increase the mass of the Earth before we risk destabilizing the orbit. It doesn't matter how large that limit is, the fact is there's a limit. Of course there's always a risk that we learn of a method to turn stone into gold, and that is why cryptocurrency is so amazing, we can use mathematics to ensure that the limit will never be undermined.
And yes, I meant to say centralized debasement is is the problem, I have corrected that mistake in my original post.
A few pools control more than 51% of the hash processing power. A cartel of them could eliminate the requirement to use Proof-of-Work (PoW) and so then we are right back to fiat again
And the moment they attempted to change any such critical aspects of the system would be the moment everyone lost faith in Bitcoin and then those pools would have doomed their entire business to failure. But I don't think that will happen because when ever a pool gets near 50% of the hashing power we always see a rebalancing of power by concerned parties. The network seems to have a natural tendency to ensure that no one entity will ever gain the majority of the hashing power. And now that we have decentralized pool software it's even less likely that one entity will ever gain more than 50% of the hashing power.
It is impossible to have a finite supply of anything without a top-down controller stealing the thing.
Why, explain to me the exact reason why that would be true.
And the mining of gold is thus competitively available to everyone.
How so? I surely cannot afford to buy the mining equipment required to mine gold. I might be able to sift out a few flakes of gold worth a few dollars if I spend hours panning down at a river, but I doubt anyone would be willing to buy a few specks of gold from me. Gold mining is a highly centralized industry which requires large and expensive machinery. So why is it ok when gold mining is so centralized but when it happens to Bitcoin its the end of the world? I designed the mini-blockchain scheme because I was worried about the centralized mining og Bitcoin, but that doesn't mean I think it will lead to the downfall of Bitcoin and it doesn't mean I've lost my faith in Bitcoin. I accept Bitcoin for what it is.