Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Fwd: death by halving

From: Gregory Maxwell <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2014 20:36:22 +0000

On Tue, Oct 28, 2014 at 8:17 PM, Ferdinando M. Ametrano
<[email-masked]> wrote:
>
> On Oct 25, 2014 9:19 PM, "Gavin Andresen" <[email-masked]> wrote:
> > We had a halving, and it was a non-event.
> > Is there some reason to believe next time will be different?
>
> In november 2008 bitcoin was a much younger ecosystem,

Or very old, indeed, if you are using unsigned arithmetic. [...]

> and the halving happened during a quite stable positive price trend

Hardly,

http://bitcoincharts.com/charts/mtgoxUSD#rg60zczsg2012-10-01zeg2012-12-01ztgSzm1g10zm2g25zv

> Moreover, halving is not strictly necessary to respect the spirit of Nakamoto's monetary rule

It isn't, but many people have performed planning around the current
behaviour. The current behaviour has also not shown itself to be
problematic (and we've actually experienced its largest effect already
without incident), and there are arguable benefits like encouraging
investment in mining infrastructure.

This thread is, in my opinion, a waste of time.  It's yet again
another perennial bikeshedding proposal brought up many times since at
least 2011, suggesting random changes for
non-existing(/not-yet-existing) issues.

There is a lot more complexity to the system than the subsidy schedule.