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Comment by mtowle | Hacker News Reader

"That's a lot!" Nah, if anything, it's surprising Nakamoto would even be that close. Hopes are one thing, but nobody predicts successes of this magnitude.

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How is a naive back-ward looking algorithm a "success of this magnitude".

Some thinking about it and any experience in modelling time-series would lend someone to put in something that predicts the difficultly of the next 2016 blocks (with some damping so that it doesn't oscillate on a constant signal) rather than using a value derived from the previous 2016.

He didn't mean that bit of the algorithm was a success, he meant that the 2016-block algorithm was failing because adoption has been so strong.

"Adoption" in this case being ASICs coming online...

But adoption doesn't affect this, in fact it was more strongly negatively affected in 2010 when adoption was overall lower.

Is it really success when a monetary policy decision turns out to have been wildly inaccurate?

Wildly inaccurate?

How happy would central banker be if they could get outcomes within 10% of their planned goals?

A central banker could easily achieve a perfectly accurate prediction of the amount of currency available, which is the type of prediction we're talking about. They print the money, so they can just print according to their predictions.

The types of central banking predictions that are usually criticized are predictions of prices in the economy. Bitcoin fares no better there.

> A central banker could easily achieve a perfectly accurate prediction of the amount of currency available

Not really. Banks and corporations hold reserves, lend "money" that's actually debt between banks not backed by hard currency, pay debt directly to the central bank... it's not that easy. At a given time, there are many "amounts of currency" coexisting at the same time.

Right. I was trying to choose straightforward terms that would make it clear that I was referring to the monetary base, not any other measure of the money supply. I guess that didn't work.

The prediction was 131 years -- I'm not sure 15 years early would be considered wildly inaccurate. I'm also not sure why we should believe that the assumptions the article makes will hold true over the next 72-112 years.

Maybe what I mean is wildly imprecise. The figure of 131 suggests a precision in years, but based on these projections it should clearly be in decades. Since there will likely be dramatic effects to running low on coins to mine, it's a pretty important thing to predict, and if that's not possible it's not a great sign.

I guess I don't know what sort of precision the market requires to deal with it, though.

The prediction was given as ~2140 rather than ~131 years, which perhaps implies less precision, and anyway was presented as an estimate.

Fair enough. I don't mean to belabor the point.

Not long from now, a quantum computer will solve each new block within a femtosecond before getting back to its main task of high freq trading and playing out millions of tactical nuclear war simulations.

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