What tail emission fixed re: relative profitability between different miners is it makes mining easier at a small scale, with less incentives to do things like reorg blocks for more money. That's why I pointed you to re-read that comment, where I explained all that.

petertodd

bitcoin

I'm Peter Todd, cryptochronomancer/web-π dev, AMA

How does that answer my question if the difficulty adjustment isn't making sure that there are always miners who are profitable? I saw your reply as an argument for tail emission.

I can see how tail emission _could_ help that miners are "reasonably profitable" but I can't see how it helps with the second part of that quote. Or was that just a general statement?

Then I am not sure if that is possible at all: How do you want to level the field such that mining is "something anyone can usefully do with a minimal amount of capital and expertise"?

In a highly competitive market, my understanding is it will never be easy to get in and turn a profit without a lot of capital and/or expertise.