I think the old adage "Don't invest more than you can afford to lose" is as important as ever.
While I don't subscribe to "doom and gloom" scenario for life in general, it's difficult to see how BTC transaction fees can support the current BTC mining infrastructure in 20 years. In electricity costs alone, the current "transaction processing" costs are just way too high.
This will become more evident this summer, and even more so in 4 more years (roughly).
If a transaction fee is say .001 (which I think is high), then you would need 1000 packed into a block to equal 1 BTC right? The costs to do that are pretty staggering right now. While I expect we'll get more efficient equipment over 20 years, I am afraid that difficulty adjustments will negate a good deal of that. I expect that for BTC to survive long term its price will have to increase substantially, AND we'll need a massive shake out in mining infrastructure to allow difficulty to fall. How many TH/s do we need to adequately provide an accurate and complete record of transactions?
What's interesting is that for most other forms of currency, there isn't a strict accounting of what the costs of supporting it are. Bitcoin makes that much more obvious.
blocks need to increase in size so that transactions grow in size. not in btc size just more transactions.
growth is crazy.. I started in 2012 the network was 20th right now I am mining 24th in my house so in 3 years and 6 months we went from 20 th to 1050 ph.
this is 51,000 x the hash. and transactions have not grown any where near this
and july 2012 transactions are 25,000 a day that is 8x
https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions?timespan=all&showDataPoints=false&daysAverageString=1&show_header=true&scale=0&address= so hash is 51,000x transactions are 8x blocks did a ½ in reward and price is up 40x
so 40x 8 = 320x vs 51,000x that is so fucking lopsided it is nuts.
=
I left out the ½ ing of 2012 and the one on the way which make the
320 to 51,000 2x worse now so 160 to 51,000 this is 340 to 1 now , but what about power ahh I could spend 200 watts for 1 gh using a gpu now I can spend .25 watts a gh and that is
800 to one so we are doing better once power factors in.
actually we are a better off right now then we were in july 2012 when I join the game.
but it is late and the math could be wrong. and I was not doing to well back in 2012 at this game.