.> Hardware costs haven't exactly been cratering recently.
No, but local models have been booming in performance/quality improvements. The RAM shortage won't last forever (more supply will come online when if demand doesn't diminish), and then the math would be pretty easy.
Why? Payphones have never been distinguished by the fact that you had to pay to use them. You also had to pay for the phone in your home.
Payphones were distinguished by the fact that they were located in convenient public places, and if you needed to contact someone, you could use them. That's still true here.
You could use a pay phone to call the operator. You can use it to make collect calls. Hell, if you were industrious enough, you could trick the phone into giving you a dial tone for free. The VoIP ones will probably be harder to trick though
People know what a payphone is, and the service it provides. As he said in the article, he chose the payphone style for what it signals to people - that it is public infrastructure.
I took his Computability class in the Hebrew University. He got angry that students were often late to class, and said that this never happened in Harvard...
For those interested in searching for more here's a Hebrew search string you can use: "פרופסור מיכאל רבין הרצאה" interesting enough Google and YT search yield results in English and Hebrew but possibly different ones than just searching in English.
The cost of finding a block goes down because it becomes less difficult.
The goal in proof of work is to find a block hash less than a given value. That value is determined by the network difficulty. The lower the value, the more difficult it is to find a block, and thus the more expensive it will be to mine.
Difficulty is adjusted once every two weeks to target an average block time of 10 minutes. If the average block time during the preceding 2 weeks is less than 10 minutes, it means that blocks were too easy to find (i.e. the difficulty was too low relative to total hash rate of the network). Conversely, if the average block time was greater than 10 minutes, the difficulty was too great.
This is how it the network has maintained a roughly 10 minute block time as the hash rate of the network has grown over the past 16 years. The difficulty (i.e. cost) of finding a block is constantly being adjusted.
What makes you so confident about this prediction? Hardware costs haven't exactly been cratering recently.
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