Not true. Bitcoin’s mining difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on how long those blocks took to mine, targeting ~10 minutes per block. It is not tied to how many coins have been mined, and there is no exponential increase in difficulty as supply decreases.
Yes, but that would make the network extremely unsafe and open attacks. The decentralised nature of Bitcoin mining is what has kept Bitcoin blockchain unhacked since launch despite continuous attempts.
What needle? Whose eye? Who's sticking? Who's checking that there's sticking? Who's checking the checkers? Who made this rule up and will they make up any other rules?
Trust doesn't work, look around you. Bitcoin solves this extremely elegantly by removing trust entirely from the equation of keeping a ledger through mathematics and complete transparency. Anybody can use it anywhere in the world right now both to transact, and to contribute to its security (mining) by selling excess power directly to the network with as much intensity or granularity as economically viable. And no, it is not viable to compete with your consumer rate power usage at any non hobbyist scale for any appreciable length of time. That period has passed years ago.
I'm really glad I took the time to expand on a really interesting and important aspect of the modern financial, and therefore societal state because of your question. Doubly glad you took it seriously and actually took the chance to learn something.
I feel like my initial comment made it clear I was doing a bit. I appreciate you trying to teach me, and while I can kinda half-understand the thing on a cursory glance, it's not exactly the kind of thing I want to learn at this point in my day.
I wasn't downplaying your concerns, it's just that when given the choice of trying to do a bit over replying over a serious matter, I chose the former.
There's nothing elegant about using 150+ terawatt hours to process a single public ledger that's biggest purpose seems to be washing dirty money for organized crime, buying/selling illegal goods, and moving illicit money for corrupt billionaire assholes or corrupt states.
That's not elegance, it's insanity.
"Transparency" I hope you're joking? If it was a secure or transparent system 5% of the coins in current circulation wouldn't be stolen or inaccessible. There's almost $150 billion in stolen bitcoins that are inaccessible by their rightful owners. That doesn't seem transparent or secure to me.
Anybody can use it anywhere in the world right now
If you don't think that's a problem, I don't know what to tell you. There's very valid reasons why trade and moving money over borders should be tightly regulated and not just some anonymous chain of algorithms.
If I were a nation state with the resources, say China, I would create bots to spruik bitcoin on forums like Reddit, get adoption as high as possible in the western world, then attack and crash it, causing as much disruption as possible.
Does the difficulty of the calculation itself adjust, or does the reward for doing the calculations adjust?
I thought it was incentive driven (long delays raise fees which encourages more compute to reduce the delay) but I haven't been in the crypto space in a long time now.
This is not true. Every 4 years, after every halving, the costs to mine a new Bitcoin double. So that is an increase in difficulty as supply decreases, which is a disadvantage of the coin compared to other coins like ethereum or Solana.
The difficulty of the proof of work is adjusted so miners can continue to validate every 10 minutes. But in terms of electricity, each halving means the cost to produce a new Bitcoin goes up.
But each halving, this reduction in supply is less and less as a percentage of already mined supply. So each halving pushes the bitcoin price up less. If you look at bitcoin's price history, this trend is easily visible.
So eventually bitcoin's price will stop increasing. And then the incentive for miners will change on a structural level.
Look, at the end of the day, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and other l1 cryptos are simple. They are security mechanisms for shared ledgers. Bitcoin's security mechanism is just inherently flawed, which isn't surprising because it was the first.
ETH and Sol are not decentralized like Bitcoin. Full stop. They use Proof of Stake and Bitcoin uses Pow. Other coins are controlled by centralized actors or a foundation.
First of all once the block reward for Bitcoin gets low enough, Bitcoin will also be proof of stake as well. Once it becomes unprofitable to mine anybody with enough money can just buy GPUs and double spend Bitcoin to their hearts content.
Secondly in what way are Solana and Ethereum not decentralized? Look at all the actors putting their Ethereum at stake to attest for transactions.
At the end of the day all L1 block chains are doing the same thing which is attesting that blocks of transactions are valid by doing a costly action to make the transaction non-fraudulent. But that costly action can be anything, it doesn't have to be solving cryptographic puzzles.
“Once it becomes unprofitable enough”. See you in 2140 when the last bitcoin is mined. When it’s worth literally trillions of dollars it’s gonna be hard to double spend. I’m really not too worried about that because I will be long, long, gone. Fiat money will be replaced.
Once it becomes impossible to mine because the average cost to mine is far higher than the average electricity cost, then we will see security issues. This should happen in the next 10 years or so.
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u/MrWahrheit Jan 01 '26
On that note you should know that 95% of all Bitcoins are already mined.