Yes... I know. And what would be the problem with that? If you say it's because some miners will decide to pull out, I will pull out my own hair, because that's exactly what my post was addressing.

Sorry, by "inflation" I meant "increase in money supply". It would be really easy to have constant inflation - just set the block reward such that every 52600 blocks mined (~1 year) would increase the amount of bitcoins in circulation by 2%. This would also be predictable. However it would constantly devalue everybody's bitcoins, just like with fiat money, so I don't know if it'd be ideal. It would incentivize mining though.

This is patently false. A 51% attack cannot steal anybody's bitcoins. Stealing coins requires knowing somebody's private key, which amounts to cracking ECDSA, and if somebody can do that they don't need 51% of the computing power to mount it.

Here is what a 51% attacker can and cannot do:

As to:

Right. Everyone who actually uses bitcoin will have an interest in making sure there's enough computing power out there to prevent even those weaknesses that remain. Plus, note that a 51% attacker doesn't gain that much, financially, from exploiting those weaknesses. They can't really steal very many coins. The most they can do is double-spend, but for large transactions, people will want to wait for at least a few confirmations, which makes the double-spending almost impossible. What a 51% attacker can really do is screw over the network and attempt to destroy it, but if they're investing that much in the computing power, they're financially better off just legitimately mining for the fees. Then they too have a vested interest in perpetuating the integrity of the network.

I RTFA. I countered this point in each of my replies. Here it is again. I'll even bold the important parts:

As miners pull out, it will get easier to mine blocks. There will never be a shortage of computation power to run the network, because if half the miners pull out, it'll get twice as easy to mine blocks. If 75% of the miners pull out, it'll be 4x easier to mine blocks. If 90% of the miners pull out, it'll become 10x easier to mine blocks.

Get it? Whatever the number of miners, transactions will continue to be verified at exactly the same rate. Look at the hashrate chart. The network was chugging along just fine in July when there were < 1,000 terahashes/second. Now there are over 40,000 terahashes/second. So if 97.5% of the miners drop out, the network will run just as well as it did in July, that is, perfectly fine.

So when you reply, tell me again why it is a problem if some miners decide to pull out? Please don't just repeat once again that the article says that the fees will be too low and thus the miners will pull out. I get that that's what the article says. Why is this an issue, given the above?

Miners can simply choose to never include transactions below a certain fee. If enough miners do this then people can keep trying to freeload by posting free transactions, but they're going to take a really long time to get into the blockchain. Miners can and will choose to only mine blocks where the total fees are worth it to try to mine. So high-fee transactions will get in quicker, and low-fee transactions will take longer.

Besides, if miners do start to drop out, the difficulty will decrease (built-in network rule), and it'll become easier (and thus cheaper) to mine. Miners will drop out until the difficulty is such that it's worth it to mine the blocks, whatever the fees are. There's no danger of not having enough computation power to run the network.

Yep, bitcoin has been doing really poorly over the past 3 years.

You might like to take a look at blockchain.info and note that just about every single transaction that's being posted right now includes a (non-mandatory) fee. It looks like your entire argument is founded upon a fallacy!

gameable how?

The security of people who don't spend isn't at stake. Their coins can't be stolen even if there's a 51% attack. Plus the security of people who make transactions isn't at stake - their transaction can't be altered even with a 51% attack. What's at stake is people who perform a 51% attack doing some double-spending. Even so, I don't see why people wouldn't just increase transaction fees up to the point where that is infeasible.

OTOH it doesn't seem like the worst thing if there was a low level of constant inflation. As far as I understand, that's still an option, if everybody agrees to update their client so the network doesn't fork.

It's like you didn't even read what I wrote at all!

"The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the time it took to find the previous 2016 blocks." So if it takes 14 days (2016 * 10 minutes) to mine 2016 blocks, the difficulty is exactly the same. If it takes more than 14 days, the difficulty is lowered. If it takes less than 14 days, the difficulty is raised. The difficulty has nothing to do with how many new coins are being generated.

Thus, if there are fewer miners, it will take longer to mine the blocks at the current difficulty, so when the next 2016 blocks have been mined, the difficulty will decrease.

Also note that as the difficulty decreases, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to mine. So the difficulty will adjust to whatever it has to be so it's economically feasible based on the amount of fees gotten from the transaction volume.

The difficulty of mining scales with the amount of miners. If the amount of miners drops, the difficulty will drop, such that you still get a block every ten minutes or so. Then the only danger is that it is easier to mount a 51% attack, since there's less total mining power. Everyone who transacts in bitcoins will have an incentive to keep the difficulty high enough such that this is unfeasible. Plus, all the transaction fees are optional - you can put out a zero-fee transaction, or a 5 BTC-fee transaction, if you like. If the recommended fees that Bitcoin Core suggests are not sufficient then everybody can just offer more fees.

Check out potholer54's series on climate change. He seems to do a good job covering what the climate scientists actually say vs. what the media reports, which is usually inaccurate (on both sides of the issue). In particular you should watch the one titled "The evidence for climate change WITHOUT computer models or the IPCC". Most of climate science doesn't rely on computer models.

Also note the IPCC doesn't do any research, rather they "[assess] the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change."

There's a difference between treating somebody differently because they are factually different (e.g. it is silly to try to get a man pregnant, but makes sense to make the same attempt with a woman; it makes sense to separate men and women in sports) vs treating them differently because of a belief that has no basis in reality (e.g. dark-skinned people are less intelligent, women are less intelligent, women can't learn how to do X, etc.). Let's keep the former while getting rid of the latter. "isms" fall into the latter category, but people sometimes go too far and slot something that'd fit into the first category as an "ism", which is equally silly (it'd be the opposite belief, treating them the same because of a belief that they're the same when in reality they're not).

But women are more valuable. Kill 90% of the men and the population will continue on quite well. Kill 90% of the women and you've got a problem.

True, that's mass though. Mass isn't the same thing as matter. I'm considering the electrons, positrons, photons, etc. to all be matter.