Topic: On bitcoin's very long term future without miner rewards (Read 945 times)

I fail to see correlation between possibility of 51% attack and my own prediction.

Not if the condition allows you to perform 51% attack and earn profit by doing it. Many PoW altcoin (such as Bitcoin Gold/BTG) suffer from 51% attack because,
1. The hashrate is extremely low
2. The attacker could rent hashrate/hardware enough to perform 51% attack
3. There are vulnerable exchange which don't have strong precaution against 51% attack or malicious user

gmax, I ask this out of respect, and more out of curiousity, than challenging your views. But did the Core developers think about the long-term future of mining, when the network relies only on fees for security? Was there any Core developer who believes that changing the block reward schedule is possible if it was “life or death” for Bitcoin?

Don't you think this idea is more productive than all this ETH 2.0 PoS sharding story? Literally, their sharding is doing just the same thing with many extra steps.


What is your prediction?

Future:
Block 2730000, Year 2060, Reward Era 14, block reward 0.00610351, coins in circulation 20.9 million or 99.99%

The last 0.01% of block rewards for miners will take 80 more years. Between now and 2030 we will see what happens. Between 2030 and 2060, another 30 years, will add about 1% to the coin supply from mining block rewards and price should have either stabilized or gone through the roof (the moon, whatever.)

If bitcoin lasts another 12 years, it's going to have a very good future. I would not worry about it for now.

Let's accept the mentioned coins are secure and never experience 51% attack but it will be unfair to compare how secure any altcoin hashrate was when dip with what will happen to Bitcoin if it happens that it hashrate is low when we know that Bitcoin is already a target by online attackers etc.
Nevertheless, BCH and BSV are shady projects and a con person will know how to find his through people like him.

ETC is also among the victim of the 51% attack.

That isn't a great way to reason about security. To give an example: Namecoin went with zero protection against stealing names for many years... and then suddenly a bunch were stolen at once.

A lack of attack so far doesn't mean something is secure.

Now-- bitcoin could probably lose hashpower and still be secure enough (esp because you could respond by just waiting days until you considered a transaction final...),  but I don't think you can conclude much from the lack of attack against some random low hashpower scamcoins.  A safer conclusion is that there is such a tiny amount of real economic activity behind them it just hasn't been worth the time and there are more profitable things to attack.

Guys, don't worry, all will be fine.
Since nobody attacks BCH and BSV, we can assume that Bitcoin will remain secure even if it's hashrate will fall down 200 times. So we can expect that Bitcoin won't have issues with security by 2060. By that time many of us will be dead. My prediction is the following:
1) First, casual users will abandon Bitcoin due to high tx fees. Bitcoin will become a vault, "a hedge against inflation".
2) Mining resources will be gradually redirected to another more perspective network. Probably it will be a fork of Bitcoin with better economics and scalability.
3) Bitcoin will be used and supported by institutions. Nobody will allow him to "die" since "he became to big". It was predicted by Satoshi.
Everybody will be happy.  

The so-called "interactive" version of cut-through is just a stupid idea which actually is the original version, lol, and no, it doesn't help miners a bit because the interactive phase is done by the users involved in the chain to keep their own fees low, and it is why they'd engage in this "interaction".

As of non-interactive cut-through, I made a few comments in the original thread trying to convince the op, GM, about the possibilities, impacts, and a very special use-case: compressing the history, received negative feedback and insistence on the stupid version.

BTW, I liked your comment and proposed algorithm, but do your best to convince Gregory, and good luck with that.

Well, I think extending the block is not needed. Probably doing some kind of cut-through is a better idea, especially in non-interactive way, but we can of course start with some interactive version to see how it will turn out in practice. Practically speaking, joining many transactions and applying cut-through on them will raise their satoshi per byte value, so effectively it will also give miners more coins per block while taking less space to store them. For now, I don't see any reasons to reject such cut-through by anyone. Thoughts?

Shower thought. "Extending" the block/mining rewards might not be "in the discussion" today, but to maintain Bitcoin as a multi-generational protocol, I'm confident everyone will get to consensus on ANY PRACTICAL solution if it is "life or death" for Bitcoin.

Yes, an emission modeled after time, at 1 per second forever (600 block reward) would have been very interesting.
Then the inflation rate would currently be at around 8%, and would take decades more to fall under 2%.
That requires a lot of patience. But it could have made Bitcoin more attractive to later generations.

  Gold buried dozens of empire to the ground,it has no capped supply.Mined for thousand years continously. That is the unbreakable,undeniable money. Adopted all over the world.

Suppose that a few oligarchs or rich elite accumulated more than 10 million coins. The more and more centralized and manipulated,less network and loose power.

Defending a capped supply in money,or commodity is absurd.

Only capped supply valuable is time.24 Hour 60 minutes. Thats it.

I don't need to, it is how things are working right now, and we have people that are endorsing it, as I said, they are talking about world reserve currency, digital gold, diamond, etc. it is the path.

I've rebuked it already: precision doesn't change anything re-distribution and supply matters. In the Third World countries, central banks take a same approach in the opposite directions for their bloated fiat currencies by removing few zeros from the unit, ask any economist and he or she tells you that it has no significant outcome.

Statistically speaking, leaking occurs mainly in the most active parts of the network and should be addressed right there, miners are the best candidates available for this purpose

Good to know  

It is not maintainable, at least there is no strong evidence that it holds in the long run, and now it is you who didn't provide any convincing argument.

You failed to provide any convincing arguments for this though.
Precision will be added simply as a result of a satoshi becoming too valuable to be a smallest unit,
not because too much bitcoin has been lost (which we'll never know except by vague guesses).

I understand the sentiment of your post, that you think a tail emission makes much more sense
than a capped supply (I am in that camp myself).

But Bitcoin, being the dominant player that it its, may be one of the very few PoW coins that can make a hard cap work in the long run. It just needs to maintain that backlog of high fee paying transactions.

You get it wrong just like @tromp, and Satoshi I suppose:
Inflation is a mechanism for "distributing" money to fresh actors but the mechanism that you propose, does not help with distribution. To understand the problem deeply, one needs to think in the edges and twilight when your hypothetical precision game is not kicked off and people are dealing with a monetary system's token that is not capable to be stored and exchanged smoothly because it is too rare/expensive and does not cover everyday business.

You suggest that in such a case some guy named Luke jr VI or Gregory Maxwell III shows up and proposes a soft fork for including new transaction formats and more precision points and everything becomes under control again, but it is not the case. Instead, by incremental reduction in availability of money, the economy gradually shifts to other devices, and it pushes the money to an even more antique status, demand decreases while the value preserves or even increases, and it makes everything worse in a positive feedback mechanism.

It is how things work in the real world and if we are arguing in a pure paradigm, there also my argument stands still that such a hard-capped supply ends to extinction. I mean, look at it again, it is so obvious that a system without input dies eventually. Right?


P.S.
I understand that such an antique situation for bitcoin is considered as a good status by some people, Actually we are hearing it over and over about bitcoin being rare and worthy because of this rareness. This is not a technical debate anymore when it comes to such wrong interpretations of bitcoin and I have zero interest to argue with people who believe in bitcoin as an antique article.

there's obviously a short term benefit if long term mining incentives turn out to be insufficient: kicking the can down the road. but given that it doesn't address the underlying problem---that miners would either need more inflation or more fee revenue to maintain adequate security---it just doesn't seem worth the ethical baggage of stealing peoples' coins.

i actually like the idea of a requirement to move coins every x blocks (could be years) and having that rule baked into the consensus system. it would make certain transitions (like dropping ECDSA for a quantum resistant signature) so much easier. it would also make for a much more predictable supply because it would be audited periodically (with non complying coins burned and/or recirculated), rather than having us perpetually ponder how many millions of lost coins there are.

ethically and re network consensus, it's much too late to do that sort of thing in bitcoin, but if i were to design a consensus system from scratch this is something i'd consider.

There is a continuous leak, but it will not necessarily cause the currency to vanish or lead to a "limited supply volume" (if I am interpreting those words correctly).

Suppose 20 million of the 21 million bitcoins are lost forever. That still leaves 100,000,000,000,000 satoshis, each of which could be potentially be subdivided further into 2⁶⁴ "nakamotos", giving a total supply of about 2x10³³ nakamotos. We should be ok for a few more millennia with that.

Assuming a yearly 1% loss rate, it will take approximately 1375 years for supply to dwindle down from 21M BTC to 21 BTC.
If by that time, each satoshi has subdivided further into 10^6 subunits, then the system can keep functioning mostly as is.
Adding on average one decimal every 229 years should suffice.

I want to shed a different light on this issue:

From a pure theoretical perspective it is inappropriate for a monetary system to put a hard cap on the money inflation process because any such system has to incorporate/support user interactions that have nonzero error rate including fatal errors that lead to the loss of money, a continuous leak of the money to non-existence and reduction of the total supply, hence a currency with capped supply vanishes in some future, and a long time before it happens, it will become obsolete/antique because of its limited supply volume.

It is hard to tell that the above argument has any practical application for bitcoin because what is done, is done. But if I was to decide about it in the first day, unlike Satoshi, I'd never stop the supply completely.  I think he did it for some kind of marketing policy, telling people that bitcoin is a rare resource, blah, blah ... yet I think it was not the best Satoshi's decision ever because, all the coins we have in circulation today will be lost sometime, somehow by someone. Right? Unlike bitcoin that is designed to be a "rare resource", time is available enough in the universe, it wins every race.