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Comment by mvindahl | Hacker News Reader

> If the market price of gold increases, the production of it will increase (though to a lesser degree of other commodities).

Yet the total amount of gold on this planet is finite, and as the millennia have passed, it has become increasingly expensive to dig it out of the ground. These are the same properties that people laud in bitcoin.

> Bitcoin's supply curve is programmed with time as the only input

As far as I am informed, bitcoin mining farms also tend to be connected to the power grid. May be just to keep the soft drink vending machine running. Dunno.

> This is a coup de grâce against every other existing store of value.

Limited supply is by no means unique to bitcoin. Gold and real estate share the same properties.

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>the total amount of gold on this planet is finite You confuse yourself with two qualities: Scarcity and Controlled Supply. The two are not the same.

>> Bitcoin's supply curve is programmed with time as the only input

>As far as I am informed, bitcoin mining farms also tend to be connected to the power grid.

The electric grid has no influence on the supply curve of Bitcoin. Do you accept the fact that time is the only input for the supply function? It does not matter if there is one miner producing bitcoin or if bitcoin's price is $1 or $1MM dollars the same amount of bitcoins are produced.

>Limited supply is by no means unique to bitcoin.

Again seems like you completely misunderstand the difference between scarcity (limited supply) and controlled supply. There's a finite amount of water on the planet (because there's a finite amount of hydrogen and oxygen on Earth) too, does that mean water would make for good money? No because water is easily synthesized from other elements. It has a very multivariable supply function.

> The electric grid has no influence on the supply curve of Bitcoin.

Difficulty readjustment mitigates long term influence of electriciry market on Bitcoin supply curve, but doesn't prevent the current prices from short-term influences

> Do you accept the fact that time is the only input for the supply function?

No.

> It does not matter if there is one miner producing bitcoin or if bitcoin's price is $1 or $1MM dollars the same amount of bitcoins are produced.

First, this isn't true over short terms, though difficulty adjustment means it should be approximately true with a steady state allocation of mining resources over the long term.

Second, though, supply isn't production caapcity, it's the mapping of price to number of units sold.

>> Do you accept the fact that time is the only input for the supply function?

>No.

Do you accept that the following line is nominally linear? https://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=1year

If you do, then you must accept that time is the only input to the supply function.

If you don't, supply a source to show what variable you think is correlated to the change in bitcoin. The data indicates, time alone.

> Do you accept that the following line is nominally linear?

> If you do, then you must accept that time is the only input to the supply function.

Er, no, even assuming the omitted x-axis is linear, I don't. The other inputs being relatively constant or having variation which mostly cancelled out each other's effects over a one year period is indistinguishable, on such a chart, from time being the only input. (Plus, the implicit function to which time would hypothetically be the only input isn't a supply function, which is a mapping from price to quantity people are willing to sell.)

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