Moore's Law

Moore's law is the observation, made by Intel co-founder Gordon Moore in 1965, that the number of transistors on an integrated circuit doubles roughly every two years at similar cost. For decades it functioned as both prediction and planning target for the semiconductor industry, driving the exponential improvement in computing that made modern cryptography and Bitcoin possible.

Why it matters

Bitcoin mining lived through its own compressed version of this curve. Mining moved from CPUs to GPUs to FPGAs and then to ASICs, with efficiency improving by many orders of magnitude to machines that now operate in the range of 15 to 20 joules per terahash. The difficulty adjustment absorbs all of it: as hardware improves and hash rate rises, difficulty rises in step, keeping blocks near ten minutes apart. Better chips raise the security budget rather than the coin issuance rate.

In the gold vs bitcoin debate

Technology cuts differently for the two assets. Improved mining technology can lower gold's production costs and raise supply, one reason gold's supply has never been fixed. For bitcoin, faster hardware mines no extra coins, ever, because difficulty adjusts. Advocates cite this as bitcoin's decisive break from every prior money: supply is invariant to technological progress. The open question Moore's law raises for bitcoin is instead long-term security, since diminishing hardware gains push miner competition toward energy prices.