Hacker News Reader

Comment by grotorea | Hacker News Reader

Well, there's always the possibility that this time it will be the last. Maybe the last peak is when it reaches global awareness and there's no new people to bring into the system. And I suspect it already reached that in the last cycle with Superbowl ads and Filipinos working in Axle Infinity.

Although, I feel cryptocurrency is already too big to ever end completely.

View on HN

The new people in the next cycle are the freshly graduated high schoolers and new grads who weren't following the news previously and have their joining bonuses and RSUs waiting in the bank.

Can they pump Crypto as high as a good proportion of the "western" population widdling their thumbs for 6 months or more during COVID?

I say western because they were the people with the disposable income and living under governments that could support furlough/stimulus payments.

It needs energy to be expended continuously in mining it, if it uses PoW. So it might end one day.

> So it might end one day.

Only if the mining stops abruptly. Otherwise, the automatic difficulty adjustment allows it to keep working even with a reduced energy expenditure. In the extreme, a single computer running in a museum could be enough to keep the blockchain working forever.

A single computer in a museum would be vulnerable to 51% attacks. It would also be too illiquid to recoup costs.

But the 51% attack would cost more than the value of the Bitcoin you could get by doing it, which is presumably ~0 since the only node is a museum computer.

The difficulty is adjusted automatically depending on how many miners there are, so it can go down.

That might be one of those things that works well in the short term but may also have severe tail risks.

I heard a similar story about an algorithmic stablecoin called Luna (I think). The analogue of difficulty adjustments there worked fine until one day it didn't.

Luna was a very different situation, it was nothing to do with difficulty adjustments.

They can ultimately change the code if needed. Luna also tried that IIRC.

Indeed, one can "change the code" to do anything... including things like increasing the bitcoin supply arbitrarily. Bitcoin's scarcity is a social construct that will be changed when the people who control the nodes want to change it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com