Topic: On bitcoin's very long term future without miner rewards - page 3. (Read 945 times)

No; we'll just see 2 camps of people. The supply-cappers and the tail-emitters.
Both agree that mining rewards should always be very significant, in order to achieve long term security and stability.
These two conflicting visions also see different outcomes of inevitable coin loss,
which I believe is very unlikely to drop below 0.1% and may be closer to 1% on a yearly basis.

Capped Supply

A supply cap requires a block reward dwindling to insignificance (long before it reaches 0).
So the significant mining reward must come from large fees. Mining stability requires a steady backlog of fee paying transactions, which in turn requires a highly constrained block size. Coin loss will erode the circulating supply over time
and will eventually necessitate subdividing the smallest unit.

Tail Emission

With an eventual (or even from launch) constant block reward, fees are only needed to deter spam, and block size is less constrained. It could be more dynamic to deal with surges in transaction demand, or slowly grow over time. Coin loss will put a softcap on circulating supply.

People who stop believing in the 21M bitcoin cap could of course try to fork away, but such a fork would very much go against Bitcoin's main principle of immutability. and would likely fare no better than altcoins that embraced the tail emission from the start, which is probably what those people would instead gravitate to.

Bitcoin cash is interesting for being in the Capped Supply camp, while being unwilling to highly constrain the block size. Which looks like a recipe for long term insecurity and/or instability.

21 million coins won't be the final limit. Majority will eventually agree to keep btc block rewards at a sustainable level.

Miners can't violate that, it's physically impossible.  If they break the locktime rule their blocks are no longer blocks and get ignored. Even if 100% of previously active miners do so, that just means is that they stopped mining.  It's no different from a technical perspective than if they all decided to award themselves an additional 100 BTC per block.

The anti-snipe protection isn't especially powerful, but it's just another tool in the set... it amplifies the incentive protections that exist from the risk of orphaning vs the small marginal gain that exists in the presence of backlog.

I wasn't referring to the block size but to the countermeasure mentioned in the medium article, that is

Regardless of the Principles of Bitcoin such a hard fork could happen. It's just that it most likely won't be accepted by the market since no one would want to buy such a coin over BTC.



If it's enforced on the protocol level, there's no way around it other than forking of into an alt coin.

Ok yeah this might mitigate the problem.
Remember that in that environment the selfish behavior would be for every miner to modify its code to take advantage of this strategy. One would have to hope that most miners wouldn't do that for the good of the network overall but that's not selfish behavior.

Because when you have mined a full block and there is a backlog, the difference in income between mining the next block (all full of pending transactions) and going backwards and remining the prior block to take its fees is small (and comes at a cost of decreased chance of eventually being in the longest chain).  This is particularly true because new transactions that are arriving cannot be included in the prior block if it is remined.

No, if a miner violates anti-fee-sniping their block is invalid and will be painlessly ignored by the network.

I honestly couldn't understand what different it makes on the matter whether block size is limited or not. Regarding the countermeasure, a miner could just use a modified code for the node to get rid of it. It's a countermeasure only on the surface.

What I ultimately meant is that if the fork is for the good of bitcoin in the long run, it will inevitably be used. I'm talking about forks with the purpose of saving bitcoin (if it were to become necessary), not forks based on different views like bch.

Yeah I guess it's going to be gradual rather than sudden.

The paper mistaken, because it analyses an abstraction which is too different from the real system. In particular it disregards that blocksize is limited, which is a factor known to address this instability since at least 2011. (There are other countermeasures as well, such as locktime based anti-fee sniping)

https://medium.com/@bergealex4/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-size-size-limit-70db07070a54

Absolutely not.

When it comes to hard forks what miners want is completely and utterly irrelevant. The consensus rules the users use are what decide who is or who isn't a miner.  If someone violates the rules individually and autonomously by the users then they just aren't a miner anymore, they might as well be sending viagra spam instead of blocks for all the users nodes would care about them.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that. The subsidy decline is geometric and will become small long before its zero.  About 10% of miner income comes from fees today.  And an income stabilizing backlog is no longer a theory but a practical reality.

As is proved in the paper, an environment where fees are the only source of revenue for miners makes selfish behavior not align with the correct functioning of the network, unlike what happens in the present.
Yes, I meant a hard fork which could happen if enough miners want solve the detrimental problems that I've been talking about.

Bitcoin is a deflationary currerency, which means the marketcap and price will be increasing. Although, the price over a short time can decrease, but Bitcoin nature is inevitable which will make the price to have a net increase over long time period. This alone will make the price to be increasing in a way the price as at then when all bitcoin are already mined to be increasing because of limited supply. Because of the price increase, transaction fee should be enough to make miners to continue mining bitcoin.

Anything that will result to finite supply of bitcoin to be altered can not occur, it can only lead to hard fork while bitcoin will remain Bitcoin with a total supply of 21 million. And I think bitcoin miners (community) will not agree with such because increasing the total supply of bitcoin will only lead to price devaluation and depreciation when there is no need, it has postitive effect for bitcoin price to appreciate.

I've been thinking about the future of bitcoin in the decades to come. Like many of you I think that bitcoin will become the world's reserve currency, if it weren't for one little problem: miner reward. I know this problem has been discussed in the past, but I have not seen much discussion in the present. There is a great paper on the topic https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf, which shows how unstable the ecosystem becomes once block rewards are taken out of the equation. Fees will not replace rewards in the sense that incentives change. How do you think it will affect future development, and when do you think this will have the first concrete manifestations both in network dynamics and price?
Do you think it will fork in other versions where there is always a tail reward like in other cryptocurrencies? If that were to happen it would destroys bitcoin's case as having a finite supply.
These issues are far ahead and I'll probably be dead before they will actually become tangible issues, but I think it's important to discuss anyways.
I'd love to hear opinions from someone who's more knowledgeable than me, so thank you in advance for any reply.