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Yes, but what I'm saying is that the way it is set up has created a cycle. Because the amount of bitcoins awarded has a half-life, and because the awarded coin always goes to the group who solves the block, this has created a situation where the competition for new coins grows all the time, leading to higher centralization (most mining is now done by commercial operators) and increasing difficulty. If you look at the chart from the wiki you'll not that although there are occasional small drops, the overall trend in difficulty has been trending up since the turn of 09/10. And that's not all, that chart conveniently ends at the end of last year. If you check the current difficulty (for example here), you'll notice it has over tripled since the start of the year.

So yes, you're very much correct that the difficulty can also go down, but what I said still true as well: so far the difficulty is trending up for the past decade and especially fast as of late, which leads to increased mining cost. It's possible that at some point competition in the professional mining industry will decrease, which might decrease the difficulty, but this is not certain, because it's just as possible that the remaining operators will simply increase their capacity to try and get a larger share of the market, which would keep difficulty up or even raise it.

25% jumps in the last weeks :) https://bitcoinwisdom.com/mark...

Rossi claims he has constructed 1 MW reactors. Assuming this was true, and assuming Rossi could sell that power for just $0.10 USD per kW-hr, then he has a machine that effectively generates income at the rate of $100 / hour.

Meh.

They're saying that the fee wont be enough to keep people in. Really, but bother to read their counter argument before you spout off about it.

I RTFA. I countered this point in each of my replies. Here it is again. I'll even bold the important parts:

As miners pull out, it will get easier to mine blocks. There will never be a shortage of computation power to run the network, because if half the miners pull out, it'll get twice as easy to mine blocks. If 75% of the miners pull out, it'll be 4x easier to mine blocks. If 90% of the miners pull out, it'll become 10x easier to mine blocks.

Get it? Whatever the number of miners, transactions will continue to be verified at exactly the same rate. Look at the hashrate chart. The network was chugging along just fine in July when there were < 1,000 terahashes/second. Now there are over 40,000 terahashes/second. So if 97.5% of the miners drop out, the network will run just as well as it did in July, that is, perfectly fine.

So when you reply, tell me again why it is a problem if some miners decide to pull out? Please don't just repeat once again that the article says that the fees will be too low and thus the miners will pull out. I get that that's what the article says. Why is this an issue, given the above?

Wish I had mod points for you. Instead here is 50 BTC (please, only the submitter click this link; it's a lot of money).