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2. mining hardware and infrastructure build out has gone thru an impressive and exponential rise over the last several years also based on a tremendous amount of work and investment capital put at risk. this is ensuring the security of the entire Bitcoin concept and encouraging savers and speculators to hold their Bitcoin based on the confidence in these miners. this mining, directed solely at the MC at the moment, can also be considered to be in a delicate equilbrium. anything that disturbs this equilibrium will cause volatility and most likely loss in the value.
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Basic theory suggests that mining will always become unprofitable no matter what the various magnitudes of various parameters. We've seen in practice that this theory seems correct. What kind of sucks about this is that the value spikes have created conditions for more sha256 hashing power to develop than can be comfortably supported by transaction fees. At least when Bitcoin is used for buying trinkets.
The problem with this is that it could make economic sense for miners to attack Bitcoin, and this is particularly the case if they are going to throw in the towel on Bitcoin and consider their gear to be a write-off. Some combination of economics and corp/gov coercion could provoke such a decision.
Two things which could help offset this threat would be:
1) increase fees to increase the reward for properly supporting Bitcoin.
2) provide a profitable outlet for the hashing power in such a way that supports Bitcoin rather than considers it dead.
3) break mining pools into smaller pieces with more focused goals and in doing so reduce the potential for consolidated strategies to be implemented.
Sidechains seem to me to have the potential to promote all three of these desirable outcomes.