[megameter]

I do think everyone saying "this can't go on forever" is correct, but lacks the imagination to describe the possible scenarios, and instead points to the speculation and energy/capital consumption as a given. But it's not a bubble in the usual sense - the miners and speculators are encouraging each other, giving pricing a rising base and profitable peaks over the course of multiple market cycles. That base will keep rising with spending on mining.

To me, the most probable outcome would be that as mining network consolidates and it gets harder to acquire more power, it becomes urgent to support the price by finding other sources of value to attach to the chain being mined, so we end up in a scenario where mining firms(which will increasingly mingle within the nation-state system) sponsor new coins and applications with additional social value.

[Closi]

> as mining network consolidates and it gets harder to acquire more power, it becomes urgent to support the price by finding other sources of value to attach to the chain being mined.

The amount of power used to mine a bitcoin will always raise in the long run so that the power costs approximately the same as a bitcoin at industrial electricity prices, less a contribution to the mining capital (e.g. the ASIC miner) and margin.