I think you’ll find that if you plot the mines gold versus available gold you’ll see that the percent of new gold introduced is asymptotic.

It’s true that he doubled down, but I also suspect he anticipated what actually happened, which was that the price of bitcoin spurred custom hardware, which ramped up the capacity to mine coins past what Moore’s Law would have predicted. It also ruined PC gaming for the lower- and middle-middle class for a few years.

Whether that’s prescient or just an artifact of a logarithmic drop off in the available key space is anyone’s guess. I don’t fix problems I don’t see as problems that often, and most of my peers are even worse.