Re: Ending in 2140?
jmch,
You're not missing anything. It's one of the (many) fundamental design flaws of Bitcoin.
Steam stopped accepting Bitcoin at the end of last year, because they said the transaction fees were hitting $20. Which is a bit bloody rubbish - if you're trying to buy a $10 game. I read in February this year (when Bitcoin hit the mad height of $20k per BTC) that transaction fees were hitting $60! I don't know if that's fallen off, since the bubble popped a bit.
Bitcoin fanbois then told us that this was OK. There was a company that would wrap a bunch of small transactions up into one big bundle - and then put that through as one tranasction on the Blockchain, so they could all share one transaction fee. Of course, what you've created there is yet another exchange - with the potential to steal your money. As well as destroying the whole simultaneous transaction schtick - that was supposed to be the point of online transactions in a low-trust environment.
Probably the sensible answer would be to lower the transaction requirements and make more Bitcoins available in future. And I suspect the miners will eventually take over whatever online committee runs Bitcoin - and do just that. But it's anathema to the economic illiterates and gold-bugs that make up so much of the Bitcoin community. So may well destroy the whole thing anyway.
One of the jobs of the Central Bank of a non-toytown currency is to try to match money supply growth to economic growth plus inflation. Get it wrong and you creat inflation - and it can be hard not to put the cart before the horse and do just that. But allow the money supply to stagnate in a situation of economic growth, and you get deflation. Which is appallingly destructive and worse than anything short of hyper-inflation.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
