Not likely because the most efficient cutting edge hardware will always be hard to come by. Unless energy suddenly becomes a lot more abundant and nearly free, making older second hand hardware profitable again. That's I've economic factor that doesn't get as much attention is the supply of energy. What happens to the Bitcoin economy if the cost of energy is suddenly reduced by 50-90% due to a technological breakthrough?
Discussion
I think energy will be free by then
If everyone has solar panel roofs etc
Why pay for energy it’s free from the sun
Technology is trending that way. I wonder how a development like that would affect Bitcoin. I have a few theories about it but I'm not sure.
Imagine a world where energy output scales 1000x or 10000x today on ultradense and/or clean/renewable standards.
A small fraction of that might involved in allowing humans to live in abundance and or terraforming the earth in the name to environmental reclamation.
The rest of that energy could all be directed at bitcoin mining and the difficulty adjustment would just do its thing.
But hopefully be then we’ll be interplanetary (minimally) and thinking about thinks like Dyson spheres and finding and killing The Engineers…
Bitcoin can't be interplanetary unless we develop faster than light communication. Some kind of quantum entanglement maybe. Most of the time it takes longer than ten minutes for light to travel from Earth to Mars except when their orbits are at their closest. Satoshi set a ten minute block time to give plenty of time for propagation across the network on earth, he wasn't thinking about Earth to Mars.