4 ms·

Finally and most importantly [...] the difficulty goes up, so more and more power is required to preserve the status quo. Except... The difficulty also goes d

• XorNot 12y ago
  Irrelevant. A decline in difficulty occurs due to a decline in hashing power. Not a decline in real energy consumption. A decline in hashing power can only happen from people looking at real energy consumption and saying "to hell with this". At which point the network compensates to keep hashing difficulty the same, but does not reduce energy consumption for any of the remaining participants. But correspondingly, the mean difficulty does go up continuously - that's the fixed number of coins. So even when the block to block difficulty is adjusted, the net trend is less coins per unit hash, which means the marginal energy cost of the coins approaches infinity.
  • moe 12y ago
    the net trend is less coins per unit hash, which means the marginal energy cost of the coins approaches infinity. Miners optimise for USD$/kWh, not for coins/hash. The latter is entirely virtual and largely unrelated to the network power consumption. which means the marginal energy cost of the coins approaches infinity You seem to ignore that Miners, too, have to pay for their energy. So, in your model, either the market price of the coins must also approach infinity, or the miners will just stop mining.