Replying to Avatar Evan

so ive been reading the whitepaper, the bitcoin standard, and trying to onboard to the bitcoin-core codebase as part of learning about bitcoin.

my main concern around hodling bitcoin was quantum, but it seems that there is already a BIP in progress to address this.

now i am wondering about free energy and moore's law... what happens when the cost of energy goes to zero and/or asics reach 1000x current efficiency. can mining difficulty increase infinitely? maybe by now this doesn't even matter because the vast majority of bitcoins are already released?
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Evan 1y ago

I think I answered my own question and this is in the realm of very hypothetical since getting to whatever a "maximum difficulty" looks like is hard to define and it doesn't even really matter since most of the supply is out there.

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Eporediese 1y ago

Well … even when all the bitcoin is mined, miners will still be competing for transaction fees. I think one way to look at it is as long as the cost of energy + compute + land … is not actually zero, the mining difficulty will adjust accordingly.