[phkahler]

>> Even the miners are unlikely to make money from mining only from holding their mining gains as investments.

And that's why I've been calling it a Ponzi scheme lately. Once mining become unprofitable, or even impossible (asymptotically) people will stop mining, but the blockchain only works if people keep mining. At some point it's got to fail doesn't it?

[tromp]

> Once mining become unprofitable, or even impossible (asymptotically) people will stop mining

It's self-correcting; fewer miners means higher profitability for remaining miners...

[csuwldcat]

False - mining in Bitcoin (which is really just transaction processing) is based on a math/crypto difficulty algo, and the system automatically adjusts itself every ~two weeks to fit the load/prevalence of miners and their block-finding success rates.