I had an idea - personally I own some BTCs (small potatoes) and I'm cheering them on but I was thinking a lot about mining and rate of return, etc... and then this thought hit me!
Let's extrapolate to the far future... when all the BTCs have been mined.
Let's assume the price of energy has skyrocketed so that it's very very expensive (but it's not Armageddon or anything)
Let's assume there's a full fledged BTC economy and people use them to buy/sell stuff.
In order for all the tons and tons of BTC transactions to occur, there needs to be people on the blockchain processing them -- which requires electrical power... which is now very very expensive.
At this point the BTC transaction fees will probably have skyrocketed as well (or else no one would spend precious energy on processing those transactions).
Isn't it conceivable that if energy costs are high enough such that processing transactions becomes VERY expensive... that it could end up becoming a huge negative liability to the BTC economy?
If energy was expensive enough (and thus trx fees) all of a sudden we'd need a currency that doesn't require lots of energy to process transactions of! And it wouldn't be BTC!
The easy counter to this idea is that with time the processing efficiency of the devices used to process transactions also increases greatly-- to the point where it at least keeps pace with the opposing rise in energy costs.. thus keeping the fees on transactions the same as they are today.
Just fun thinking out loud. What do you think??