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Comment by bufferoverflow | Hacker News Reader

Can you demonstrate this at all? Bitcoin has been mined for over a decade and never came even close. When miners drop off, mining difficulty decreases.

If you're talking about a nuclear war scenario, we will have much bigger problems than bitcoin mining being slow.

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> Bitcoin has been mined for over a decade and never came even close.

The problem with using past performance of the Bitcoin network as an indicator of future performance is that the exponential nature of halvings means that each decade is a vastly less subsidized environment for the network than the one that came before it. Over the last decade the network has given ballpark 4.2mm BTC to miners for their services; there are now about 1.7mm BTC available for miners for all time.

The reward has only gone down in absolute BTC numbers - in terms of purchasing power I'm pretty sure the reward is trending up.

Expecting this trend to continue forever means expecting the value of Bitcoin to double every four years. It’s basically the wheat and chessboard problem: possible the first few times, then quickly impossible https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheat_and_chessboard_problem

Transaction fees are supposed to compensate for the decline in newly minted coins. Using very bad back-of-the-envelope math, transaction fees are about $2 right now, with about 2,300 transactions per block. That works out to a couple billion dollars over the last 10 years, which isn't peanuts.

(Again, bad estimate that uses USD and today's numbers as if they'd been the same since the beginning.)

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