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Topic: [2014-08-27] For Bitcoin’s Miners and Spenders, a Supply and Demand Imbalance (Read 1063 times)

legendary
Activity: 4060
Merit: 1303
"the amount of mining activity keeps increasing"

Which does not change the amount of coins available, at most it slightly increases the speed at which they become available.  As aigeezer said, the "crisis of the moment" is nothing.  The "degree of difficulty" has been increasing forever, just varying in the amount (with only a few times where it actually dropped slightly).

This is just a WSJ Blog, so pretty meaningless IMO.
legendary
Activity: 1450
Merit: 1013
Cryptanalyst castrated by his government, 1952
tl;dr - "the built-in adjusting mechanism" - don't worry about the WSJ's manufactured crisis of the moment. The sky is not falling after all. Maybe next time though.
hero member
Activity: 536
Merit: 500
http://blogs.wsj.com/moneybeat/2014/08/26/bitbeat-for-bitcoins-miners-and-spenders-a-supply-and-demand-imbalance/

The number of transactions have been stable this year, in a range between 60,000 and 80,000 a day, according to data from Blockchain. That’s a huge jump from under 10,000 a day two summers ago. The problem is the number of transactions has plateaued at those levels, but  the amount of mining activity keeps increasing. The degree of difficulty in mining – the built-in adjusting mechanism that makes solving the bitcoin algorithm harder as more miners come onboard – has jumped twice recently, and the hashrate, a measure of total mining activity, has been rising as well.
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