Debasement doesn’t reduce fees tho, these two aren’t correlated. You would pay the same fees, regardless of debasement or not.
I don't know about that.
Thats how it is tho, it doesnt change anything about how transaction fees work.
The concern of some people is that transaction fees alone wouldn’t be enough to compensate miners and thus secure the network.
That's a pretty generic statement. How would we know if the transaction fees were not compensating miners enough? Would a red light pop up on peoples' bitcoin core?
We would know when too many miners started behaving dishonestly or too many couldnt afford to mine anymore, when honest miners cant keep outpacing attackers. The compensation just serves as an incentive for miners to stay honest, theres no fixed amount that determines whats enough for people to stay honest. It works on the basis that a majority stays honest, doesnt matter how.
Its a valid concern, but there are good counter arguments to this.
OK but again, the phrase "transactions fees are less likely to be enough to compensate miners" doesn't explain what happens if that's the case. Does a red light pop up on peoples electrum and refuse to allow them to do a transaction? And say "we're not being compensated enough to mine your transaction" ?
Higher risks of 51% attacks, so possible risk of double spendings, preventing transactions from getting confirmed etc.
As well, who gets to decide if miners are being "compensated enough"? Do they have some type of minimum wage for bitcoin mining?
If its extremely expensive to carry out these attacks, then its less likely to happen. Especially if it would be more profitable to work for the network than to attack it. If a majority remains honest regardless of compensation then they can still outpace any attacker, but they have running expenses so even someone honest will need compensation to keep mining. So if its profitable for a big amount of people, its likely that a big amount of people will mine honestly. No one wants to bite the hand that feeds them.
Debasement doesn’t reduce fees tho, these two aren’t correlated. You would pay the same fees, regardless of debasement or not. The concern of some people is that transaction fees alone wouldn’t be enough to compensate miners and thus secure the network.
Reducing fees wouldn’t be that simple, you need to let more transactions in. But this comes at the cost of decentralization, depending on how much throughput you let in, because it becomes much harder to run a node. And if blockspace isn’t scarce enough, transactions fees are less likely to be enough to compensate miners, because it’s based on a fee market.
That statement demonstrates a lack of understanding about the economics of Bitcoin mining.
Here is how it works: If a miner feels that they are not being adequately compensated for mining (simply stated, they aren't making a profit), they will stop mining, and the difficulty will adjust to increase the compensation for the miners that remain. That process will continue until the remaining miners feel that they are being adequately compensated. So, only in an exceptional scenarios will transaction fees not be enough to compensate miners.
However, as @tadamichi also states, there is a danger that low transaction fees could become a security risk. It is the value of the block reward (and not the number of miners) that determines the level of security against a 51% attack.
Ofc im not dumb, all i said is that its not easily possible to reduce fees without potential security or decentralization drawbacks. Idk if you correctly understood what i wrote. If there would be more blockspace than demand for it, there would be lower transaction fees than otherwise, its just logical. There would be no icentive to pay more than the minimum fee, when this one would always make it into the block anyways. So you need to maintain some level of scarcity, for achieving higher fees. Demand needs to outgrow blockspace, otherwise no one would choose to pay higher fees. And when miners solely rely on fees for compensation, higher total fees will be a bigger incentive to keep miners honest/ enabling more miners to mine profitably, than lower ones.
I never said that fees wont be enough compensation, i think they will be. And ofc the number of miners matters too to a certain degree, if there was just 5 miners left, it couldnt seriously be considered secure anymore(ik this wont happen).
