Quote from: TNBS on July 25, 2014, 06:45:10 PM

Lets say I crash the party and start up my miner at the beginning of the block, I could easily find it within (for the sake of the argument) say 10 seconds. The difficulty would change tremendously in order to account for this increase of mining speed. Then lets say I turned off my miner, the other mining equipment could take a while before finding a block at the adjusted rate.

Solving just 1 block quickly would have minimal effect on the difficulty adjustment. The difficulty is calculated based on the average rate of blocks over a set of 2016 blocks. If you only solved 1 block quickly (shall we say instantly?), and the other 2015 of them were solved at the 10 minute average, then the average rate over 2016 blocks would be 599.70 seconds per block (or 9.995 minutes per block).

At worst, you could spend significant amounts of electricity to mine all 2016 blocks as fast as possible. This would result in the difficulty increasing at the maximum of 400% after 2016 blocks. If you then shut off your equipment, the next 2016 blocks would come at an approximate rate of 1 block every 40 minutes (assuming that nobody else is adding more hash power to the network in the meantime).

Quote from: TNBS on July 25, 2014, 06:45:10 PM

Essentially nothing is finite in the blockchain system, no matter how much everyone thinks it is.

Nothing is finite? You are saying that bitcoin is somehow intrinsically infinite in every way? I don't undertand that statement. It doesn't seem to make any sense.

Quote from: TNBS on July 25, 2014, 06:45:10 PM

You can argue the date on when the last bitcoin will be mined, but given that this is the first of its kind my guess is still; the date is unknown.

You are correct, the exact date is unknown. However, it can be reasonably estimated to be somewhere around the year 2140.