[Mithriil]

To follow up on the idea.

It HAS a physical tie: it is the energy spent to run the chain, which is, however, backward to gold being a material. And it's not to the advantage of the owners, but of the miners.

I can easily see a catastrophic scenario out of this: a downward spiral of value happens for XY reason, and then a halving happens. That makes the mining of it suddenly highly costly, which makes it uninteresting, or less and less profitable to mine, which renders the chain slower and less popular, etc.

However, I think that the popularity of Bitcoin is still on the rise, and we won't see such a downward spiral before many halvings (20 years? That's a lot of GWh lost to useless computing...)

[audleman]

You're forgetting about difficulty adjustment. Every time mining gets more expensive large number of miners drop out. This causes the difficulty target to drop. The remaining miners then start mining more blocks and profits rise. As a system it has built-in economic incentives to keep in in homeostasis.