No design needed. If the price of gold doubles, twice as much resources can be invested to dig up a ton of gold.
Bitcoin adds artificial scarcity that isn't intrinsic. And unfortunately society as a whole pays for that additional scarcity by increasing the resources spent mining blocks.
I am not saying this is an unacceptable trade-off all things considered. I just think the gold analogy is flawed.
I disagree. Gold was specifically chosen to be rare and hard to counterfeit. That's why we don't use sea shells as a store of value. In that respect I don't see how awarding value to holders of a shinny yellow metal is any different than awarding value to holders of a hard to find hash.
(But yeah, gold hoarding is pretty wasteful in multiple ways too)
Isn't most hoarding wasteful?
it does, kind of. as we use up the easy to find deposits, the remaining deposits are harder to mine/refine, so essentially it does get harder.