35 sats \ 3 replies \ @jgbtc 14 Apr 2023 \ on: Bitcoins Are Not Mined, They Are Issued over Time | dergigi.com bitcoin
That's what mining is, no? I mean a coal miner doesn't create coal, he discovers it and makes it available for use, i.e. he issues it.
There's no discovery of new Bitcoin. That's what gold mining is.
Bitcoin mining is the mechanism that ensures a stable and predictable issuing of new Bitcoins over time at an average rate of 10 minutes per block, with an ever decreasing amount (halvings).
One of the properties of this system is that it's independent of the mining hash rate. That means that even if the miners amount or speed increases, the system updates itself to keep the time for a new block stable at 10 minutes on average. Same if the miners are slower/unlucky/fewer.
In contrast, the amount of gold you find is directly proportional on the amount of gold miners you have.
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There's no discovery of new Bitcoin.
We could argue that finding the nonce which fulfills the block requirement could be called "discovery", no?
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It is different than mining gold in that very important way. However gold has a difficulty adjustment of sorts, for example during the California gold rush it was initially very easy to find gold in streams by panning, but this changed once the area was overrun with hopeful prospectors. Bitcoin is superior to gold in many ways, one of which is a more effective difficulty adjustment mechanism. I agree that bitcoin is not "discovered" in the same sense as gold or other mining, definitely not a perfect analogy. But I think the mining analogy is still useful because it gives us an opportunity to highlight this crucial distinction. Plus it's so firmly fixed in the public consciousness there's no way we're changing it now.
Also, one thing Bitcoin mining does discover in a sense is the cheapest sources of energy.
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