[runlvlzero]

Originally Posted by Orruar [You must be logged in to view images. Log in or Register.]

Ding ding ding, we have a winner. The coins get harder to mine as time goes on, which means there's eventually a balance point where it costs just as much in inputs (hardware, electricity) as you get from mining. They are pretty much at that point. So now more mining occurs as the price goes up, less as the price goes down. And over 50% of the total bitcoins have been mined so far, so the total supply isn't going to increase drastically (like our US$ supply has been).

I'm not familiar enough with bitcoin to know whether someone can just change some lines of code, but I thought I read something about how since it is a distributed app, you would have to take over the majority of the computational power of the network as a whole to screw with anything, and that's much more than the combined power of the world's supercomputers currently. And I believe they also said that such power (which would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to obtain) would only allow the malicious person to do a few relatively minor things, like roll back transactions within seconds after making them. Do you have a source or anything showing such a weakness of bitcoin?

I've also heard that since it is open source, it is simple to make other copies of bitcoin (litecoin comes to mind). Competing currencies are a good thing and will help find what works the best. If bitcoin does end up with massive inflation through some kind of software modification, people won't trust it and won't want to use it. Not if there are other alternatives. And clearly nobody should be holding any substantial part of the portfolio in any single currency.

The guy in the video estimated something crazy like 5 trillion or 500billion investment. to do that. And its still not perfect.