Bitcoin mining efficiency and Botnets

[eugen@leitl.org (Eugen Leitl)]

On Tue, Oct 15, 2013 at 03:50:03PM -0700, Bill Stewart wrote:

> Anarchism's a great thing, but if you're trying to run an actual economy,
> you need to make it workable for economic reasons, not just ideological ones.
> Now that mining takes actual work and non-trivial amounts of electricity,
> and there are enough bitcoins on the market that you can just buy them,
> people are only going to do it if they can make a profit.

Difficulty is adaptive, so it will go down if hash rate goes down.
It's not a one-way ratchet.
 
> (If the market gets big enough that there aren't enough bitcoins
> circulating to meet demand, the price goes up,
> and maybe mining becomes profitable again.)