Murtaza Hussain
@mazmhussain
I support the existence of Bitcoin as a limited opt-out from the existing financial system but one thing I do not understand is the idea that it could serve as some kind of post-apocalyptic currency amid a general social collapse. The Proof-of-Work is famously energy intensive and requires gigantic industrial infrastructure to operate, not to mention the significant physical infrastructure of the internet itself to keep the system operating. So if our current mode of government and business somehow implodes who is going to provide and maintain all that? Especially for younger people the idea that Bitcoin is real and going to stick around is already culturally ingrained so as I've said before its unlikely to go anywhere soon. But I actually see it as thoroughly part of our current system rather than a forerunner of some kind of revolution. If this system collapses, indulgently expensive manifestations of it like Bitcoin will go with it too.
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shazow
@shazow.eth
The difficulty level self-adjusts, but you are right--it would be very hard to maintain mining decentralization in a collapsed society. It mainly works if there's aggressive competition upwards. The deciding factor for relatively slow 10 minute block times was to facilitate transmitting over degraded infrastructure in case of global failures, like ham radio or satellite. This would be an amazing premise for a scifi: Society is collapsing, and a bunch of groups around the world are scrambling to take a strong mining position in the bitcoin ecosystem with random cobbled together laptops or whatever. Then at some point someone finds a basement of working ASICs and instantly takes 99.9% of the hashing power
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