Hey, I never said it was likely.
But some parts of bitcoin's design were made with the assumption that it would not be small for long. If bitcoin ends up in a couple of niches, the mining reward won't be enough to pay for security and/or the fees will be too high to be useful. In the long run, of course.
Yes, that is a potential problem. A weakness of Bitcoin is that there is no
direct demand for security of the blockchain. In other words, those using Bitcoin don't really care if the next block is generated at a difficulty of 1 or a difficulty of 1 quadrillion. They just want their transactions to go through. If the price of Bitcoin stays too low, this could be a problem. The miners would continue to mine at a rate that is profitable, but that could mean a lot less security, and diminishing security for the blockchain. If Bitcoin simply had a fixed reward for miners forever this wouldn't be as much of a problem. I believe there were other spinoff cryptocurrencies that went this route. I don't think this would fly with the current group of Bitcoin enthusiasts though, because they love the fact that there will only ever be 21 million BTC in existence. We will see how this plays out...
truth is you dont need THAT much power for reasonable security.
the fact is that a double spending is possible and might even become "easy" to pull off if the hash rate drops dramatically.
but who the hell cares?
as long as you wait for enough
confirmation you can rest assured you now own the bitcoins,
the only time double spending would become an issues is if you pay from something like a big screen TV, and run out the door of the store b4 they realized it was double spent coins you paid with. ( good luck orchestrating such an attack, even with a very low hash rate....)
and if you can buy stuff at your local store with bitcoin, bitcoins value will surely be enoght to support a very high hashrate.
am i making any sense?
