1343 sats \ 5 replies \ @03393ec3a3 4 Sep 2023 \ on: Biggest Bitcoin concerns, go! bitcoin
For me, it’s fixed supply / halvings outrunning game theory. I am not sure the whitepaper calculations account for MEV, inscriptions, Mempool.space Accelerator, and hashrate markets/derivatives. Theories abound that decreased subsidies will gradually give way to network fees and that will be okay, but my previous experience in altcoins makes me think that high fees eclipsing any subsidy will provoke toxic reorgs and shenanigans. I don’t see a way out - paying higher fees to speed up your transaction just results in more incentive for shenanigans. Finding ways to extract value from blockspace (OP_RETURN, inscriptions, etc.) seems to break whitepaper assumptions that miners only receive value from block rewards. Hopefully I am wrong.
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @BitcoinIsTheFuture OP 4 Sep 2023
My understanding is that more code will need to be put in place to truly limit the 21 million
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50 sats \ 0 replies \ @03393ec3a3 4 Sep 2023
Based on what I see in the Bitcoin Core source code validation.cpp file, I disagree - the subsidy has an exponential decay for 64 epochs and then 0: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validation.cpp
CAmount GetBlockSubsidy(int nHeight, const Consensus::Params& consensusParams)
{
    int halvings = nHeight / consensusParams.nSubsidyHalvingInterval;
    // Force block reward to zero when right shift is undefined.
    if (halvings >= 64)
        return 0;

    CAmount nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
    // Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks which will occur approximately every 4 years.
    nSubsidy >>= halvings;
    return nSubsidy;
}
The critical thing to note is that reaching 0 is not when the problem occurs. Instead, the incentive for shenanigans grows as the subsidy declines in relation to fees, so probably in a couple of halvings things will start to get weird. Maybe I'm missing something.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @handsome_latino 4 Sep 2023
I'm also quite worried about this too, but as a selfish human being, for practical purposes, it might not affect us so much in our lifetime (depending how old you are -- I'm already almost halfway).
My children will learn to adapt and figure it out just like we have. Everything will be alright.
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30 sats \ 1 reply \ @03393ec3a3 4 Sep 2023
All we need for problematic shenanigans is for fees to approximate subsidies for honest block production, then at that point, out of band funding or bribes set direction. If I’m not completely wrong, we could see issues in 5-9 years. Really hope I am missing some variables here.
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0 sats \ 0 replies \ @handsome_latino 5 Sep 2023
Yeah, I also agree. Last time that fees were multiple BTC per block, they already started thinking of services for transaction accelerating.
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