02:21
O K
Not having a background in physics and mathematics, I find myself feeling a bit obtuse reading that. I tend to disagree that there is an incentive to keep the difficulty high though. While the people mining get a larger portion of the block reward like you suggest, there are other assumptions here that are being taken for granted. For instance, that increasingly slow block times may give people wanting to purchase cause for concern about the health of a blockchain, and thus not be willing to purchase at the price offered by the greedy miner who wants difficulty high. At the end of the day, regardless of cost to mine, supply and demand is the decider of the price of the coin, and that may not align conveniently for the seller.