Topic: Bitcoin fees and future (Read 73 times)

Satoshi Nakamoto said this years ago too in What's with this odd generation?.

If Bitcoin blockchain is alive and there is transaction volume, there is consequently transaction fee for Bitcoin miners.
Bitcoin blockchain is Proof of Work, and Bitcoin miners keep mining if they get positive income after deduction of input cost, through Bitcoin block subsidy and transaction fees.

Bitcoin will be very expensive because the miners only earn through solving the cryptography, run ASICs requires electricity cost, initial investment to buy the hardware and maintenance the hardware. If the miners didn't earn enough to cover the money they spent, they might leave it, just like solo miners who have left Bitcoin.

But, 2140 is really long to go, the recent problem is we don't even know what will happen with Bitcoin after centralized institutions own most of Bitcoin and tightening the rules about Bitcoin.

If no one spent money there would be no purpose for money!

It's still decentralized, as anyone can become one of these nodes, just not every single user. The developers actually stripped out the ability to easily turn on mining from the base wallet software back in 2011: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/pull-remove-gui-generate-coins-option-5353

And with the dominance of asics (special type of chip that mines faster than cpu's or gpu's found in typical computer's) there is no point in attempting to mine unless you buy specialized hardware.

There's some intresting stuffs about fees eventually getting too small to incentivise miners: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons

It seems there is a link between fees and security of the system, which may be impact the fees level.

Senders already must include fees to get a transaction added to the ledger quickly. These fees go to the miners/maintainers. The amount of those fees is function of supply and demand between people creating transaction and miners/maintainers. Those fees will be the sole incentive after new money stops being created, which will be reduced gradually over time not suddenly.

firstly the normal blockreward is sufficient to cover miners for a few cycles(halving periods) before fee's become meaningful(say 2040+)
so no real need of a fee war to force people to pay more right now to feed the miners

however by the time we hit year 2100 the normal blockreward would be so small, no one would care because fee's will be the significant portion by then anyways
no one will even think or discuss the blockreward in 2140 as all discussion way before then would be about fees

also by then (reminder we are talking about 75 years from now) the bitcoin blockchain and basically all electronic tech would have evolved to allow more data per 10min to not be limited to just a few mb per 10min(we already can surpass 4mb safely right now if dev-politics was not in the way(hint: not a technical barrier, just a dev-political barrier))

so its not going to be a situation in 75 year of only ~3000tx per block having to pay $1000 worth of sats per tx to cover a $3m block cost, but instead we would and should have scaled the space for many many many more transactions per block by then, so each transaction pays very little per transaction to still be a popular value transfer network

remember just 25 years ago kodak was arguing 1megabyte flashmemory was going to be too expensive to be consumer practical.. now we have terrabyte+ flash memory

The point of bitcoin has never been no fees.

Anyway, if there are no transactions, then Bitcoin is dead.

So when mining we actually calculating other people transactions. What if everone just mining and nobody make transactions? The whole point of bitcoin is that it has no fees if you use professional mode wont that defeat the purpose of not having a central computer? And after 2140 there will be no reward to maintain the network then why would anyone bother doing it? Would the people investing money into these servers not just quit right away causing the whole system to collapse and the value of money be completely lost?