On Mon, Aug 1, 2022 at 10:58 AM Jason Resch <[email protected]> wrote:
>> As the number of bitcoins approaches 21 million the amount of energy >> required to mint a new one will increase exponentially and will approach >> infinity asymptotically. >> > > *> Not necessarily, because as I explained the block reward decreases too. > So the economic incentive also decreases.* > The number of bitcoins you get as a reward may decrease but that's not important, what's important is the amount of stuff you can buy with that reward, and as the economy increases in size, as it will as technology improves, then that reward will get bigger because each Bitcoin will be worth 1/21 millionth of the world's economy. *> Your theory of what will happen with bitcoin would conclude a gold miner > will put in exponentially more and eventually infinite energy into mining a > gold mine that is drying up.* > And that is exactly what a rational gold miner would do if gold kept exponentially increasing in price and was asymptotically approaching infinite valuation. >>Energy cost is one factor that determines the price of gold but not the >> only one nor the most important one. And gold is irrelevant, it hasn't been >> an important factor in the world economy in over a century, but paper money >> has. And unlike Bitcoin it doesn't take an exponentially increasing amount >> of energy to run a printing press. >> > > *> You conveniently (for you) cut out my paragraph showing the printing > press does require vast expenditures of energy. Since printed money is > based on debt, and debts are typically secured against assets of value > which required great expenditures of energy to produce (in line with the > value of the asset, and therefore in line with the amount of money > created).* > That does not compute. It doesn't matter if you're using Bitcoins, dollars, or monopoly money, the entire purpose of an economy is not to create money but to create assets of value, money is just a bookkeeping device and Bitcoin is an enormously inefficient bookkeeping device. John K Clark See what's on my new list at Extropolis <https://groups.google.com/g/extropolis> 914 -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/everything-list/CAJPayv29bCAzDs7gAgx3gyX-HW4Y5jYcYyHwsYvbSpT_VpVRfg%40mail.gmail.com.
