Topic: I have something curious about POW (Read 340 times)

Please, explain how Bitcoin can deal with the world's demand for on-chain transactions while keeping said transactions fast, cheap and the network in which all of this happens decentralized, because I can't see it.

LN has problems of centralization at layer 1, there are valid arguments about it.

on-chain scaling has centralization at layer 0 (so this leads me to think this is worse than LN, irrespective of how bad LN can be), there are valid arguments about it.

The "Bitcoin for the rich only", is a valid outcome, assuming that the rich find an incentive in paying these big transaction fees. The blockspace will be there for anyone that can afford it to use. There would need to be enough transactional activity for miners to find it worth mining tho. You can claim mining rewards will be there, but in 2140 there will be no more mining rewards, so you need transactional activity. I wonder how often "the rich" (whatever qualifies as "the rich") would use Bitcoin at that point. There needs to be an equilibrium there to keep miners incentivized, otherwise hashrate would go down which would make it less worthy for anyone involved (the main point would be the security in which the wealth would reside, but this wealth is backed by high hashrate, and this high hashrate needs transactions to keep the miners spinning the wheel).

No.  Transactions will continue



Works well if you can search online by yourself in Google, Wikis, Forums, etc.

Even worse in PoS, not only can you do 51% attack by gathering majority of coins now, but gathering the majority of addresses used at any point in that altcoin's history. You can use addresses that are now empty to do a 51% attack in PoS. Just imagine people who don't have any of those coins anymore selling their old private keys to someone who is going to use them to reorganize a PoS "blockchain".

A 51% attack is quite possible with POS as well. Especially with low cap coins. A checkpoint server can help. But then the coin is basically centralized.

Agreed above comments about how the miners gain after they had finished the mining

Here is a site where I learnt about blockchain and cryptocurrencies from, this is a very detailed and useful site for fundamental knowledge need.
https://blockgeeks.com/guides/
As I remember, there is a post about PoW and PoS, you should explore more about other than these two, there are a few more consensus method, and do comparison about these method. I believe you will also encounter more questions like what is Hard Fork and Soft Fork, how are the different cryptocurrencies working or solve any problems. There are a lot more to work on.

If you still encounter some questions on a particular issue, actually in bitcointalk there are already some posts of similar questions, you may search it, or from reddit there are also some serious discussion forums, but there are much harder

Hope these can help you

If bitcoin is what it is, resistant to change, there will be no skyrocketing because rigidity makes every system vulnerable to catastrophic factors and events. And if change is feasible  for this system it can not be judged as of its current protocol and conventions.

I think bitcoin should figure it out through its evolutionary path to handle the hypothetical situation in which mining is not incentivized by block reward and transaction fees should compensate for it.

Saying that only rich will transact on-chain in a hundred years later because fees will cost too much for ordinary transaction is nothing less than condemning bitcoin to death. I Knew Core guys endorse this kind of perception of bitcoin as a store of value only digital asset, a heirloom kept safe in cold wallets or deposited in central crypto banks.
I'm just surprised seeing you and your mates being a member of the Core team too  

Anyway, bitcoin have been designed in the first place to be a monetary system not as a digital gold, whatever and this is the most bitcoin compatible scenario for the future:

Bitcoin will evolve to support hundreds of thousands of transactions per minute, prices will be really high and transactions suggest a fraction of one satoshi per byte and a total of say, 2-3 Satoshis as transaction fee for an ordinary transaction being 250 bytes long or so. Yet it worth 1-2 dollars per transaction and can produce millions of dollars of income daily while  miners have invested enough to justify that levels of income by offering secure, fast and immutable transaction processing services to the public. No off-chain TP, no LN.  

PoW has two roles now.
The most important is to securely confirm the transactions.
Another role is in the fair distribution of the coin.

For the job of confirming transactions, the miners get paid. That's why each transaction needs a tx fee. It's the money for the miners.
Today the miners also get the block reward. This is decreasing and in a number of years it'll become 0. But it will not mean the world (of Bitcoin) ends. The tx fees will still be there and we all hope the price of Bitcoin and the number of transactions will make the mining still be profitable without the block reward.

For reading I recommend you start with Bitcoin wiki https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Proof_of_work and  Andreas Antonopoulos's "Mastering Bitcoin" https://github.com/bitcoinbook/bitcoinbook

Some people are skeptic about the transaction fee being enough incentive for mining activity to keep the network safe. In theory it should be enough since the price of Bitcoin should be really high by 2140. By then, unless new technology has been invented, I guess no one is able to transact on-chain anymore, not even rich people may see it viable. It will be a settlement network of LN activity only.

We'll never be able to find out how things look like by then, unfortunately, so we can only imagine the different outcomes and plan for it. Assuming Bitcoin is still the most solid place in crypto, I guess it's safe to assume fees will be enough for miners to keep at it.

I would like to see some model simulations to get some actual "Bitcoin-in-2410" numbers.

In my opinion I prefer POS. So many 51% attacks going on because of POW, the future is POS in my opinion and less energy consumption which is a good thing to all those not living in third world countries where electricity is cheap.

There will always be more blocks to mine, only thing that happens every 4 years is that inflation of bitcoins halves eventually approaching zero.
Miners will always be able to earn transaction fees from transactions they include in their blocks.

In my understanding, what OP's talking about "mining" is the Block Reward against the Max 21m Bitcoin cap that's nearly catching up.

Based on that, what they said was true
but as an addition, mining won't reach the point where transaction fees are the only reward during our generation or the next.
The block reward is designed to reduce by half in every 210,000 blocks, you do the math.

Even so, based on useability, transaction fees and satoshi as a reward can still motivate the hardcore or loyal miners of the network if Bitcoin still exist 120 years from now.

Hi
No,after all blocks are mined,they will be no longer Bitcoin generated.Transactions will still countinue to work normally and miners will get rewarded from the transactions fees everytime you pay when doing a transaction.
I hope this answers your question
Regards
Edit:If you want to learn about cryptos consensus just google what you want to know about (For exemple Proof of work,just google it, Proof of stake etc..)

I learnt that Bitcoins and some other coins use POW, so they have transaction and mining on a same line.

That means, if all BitCoin blocks are mined in several years, does BitCoin lose its usage as transaction?
Is that right?


Also can anyone recommend me a good site where I can learn about types of cryptocurrency proofs?