Comment by MetaWhirledPeas

Your gold analogy might actually help me make my point. When the California gold rush was happening people went nuts trying to mine for it. Eventually the mining slowed, presumably because the cost to mine it started to exceed the value of it. Bitcoin claims to be this way (you may have known this; I had to look it up), stating that mining will halt at 21 million Bitcoins. But didn't Bitcoin already fork in the past? And won't there always be a new cryptocurrency to fall in love with? Unlike gold, when Bitcoin mining wanes someone can just invent "gold plus" with a few keystrokes and then here we go again. The feedback loop may not be confined to a single cryptocurrency but I still don't understand how it will ever end.