Intel has entered the game and I think that they've made a much more comprehensive research than you and me.
They are a hardwere producers not a miners. So they care to sell x amount of units not about how profitable they are. Am I wrong here?
I talk about mining ASIC chips. I don't know if they make the miners too or only the chips and it doesn't matter much in this discussion. Even if they're only the chips, they have no other use than for mining Bitcoin or similar coins, hence being used inside mining hardware.
And they can sell a good number of units only if mining stays profitable. Else the mining businesses will certainly not invest into new hardware... At least this is how I see the things.
The Intel miners (ASIC chips or full devices, whatever) are a novelty, but I doubt people (and businesses!) will only buy them as collectibles
You are right that example I posted shows very far future. My point was to show the end-game that we are heading too. How negligible the last halving will be. So the good question is where are we now? We know that first halving (reduce inflation from 25% to 12%) had huge impact on price and was fallowed by a 100x pump. Second one (from 9% to 4,5%) was fallowed by a 40x pump. Third halving (from 4% to 2%) and a 6x pump. 4th halving will reduce inflation from 1.5% to 0.7% and its possible that we will do only a 2-3x pump or not if markets will be disturbed by recession or WW3.
5th halving and we will cut inflation from 0.6% to 0.3%. Does it matter? Especially if we evaluate bitcoin in a currency that inflation changes by 1% in a month/month basis.
This math is actually not too bad. But this means the next pump will go 2-3x from the last ATH (if no recession or bigger war). And this contradicts the initial statement that in the next decade (meaning 10 years) the price stays in the 20k-60k range.
So what I've missed or where we don't understand each other?
I know the narrative, that miners wont sell at loss so price have to go up. But price will go up only if we assume that demand is constant. Which is not. It can go down as well and those miners that did not sell at loss wont have cash to pay for bills and will go bust reducing difficulty for others. Other miners will mine cheaper bitcoins that they will sell at profit even lower. Difficulty doesn't have to go up all the time.
That's correct. Still, the history has shown for now that the difficulty went down only for rather short periods of time and this trend seems to still be strong. For how long? I don't know, but, again, it breaks that 20k-60k range prediction.
I'm not saying that bitcoin will not reach new ATH. I'm saying that all 3 scenarios posted above are possible and the fact that we will have halving in next year doesn't change that.
Franky1 has some interesting calculations he posts here and there. According to those, now the minimum price for obtaining bitcoin (by the miners) seems to be at about 15k (maybe 16k).
The halving will make that minimum price become 30k (maybe 32k), hence I think that it's still the main fuel for the next massive pump (or bubble).
As I said, your long term calculations are not bad, still, last block (777359) had 6.25
BTC block reward and less than 0.25
BTC tx fees; the tx fees are still not a big enough percentage of the total income to make a real difference. I think that the problems you're telling about will really happen only when the tx fees will become larger then the block reward.