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I am going to explain why tail emission is an attack on the Bitcoin core principles and why it would spell the end of Bitcoin as we know it, if ever implemented in any serious kind of way.
Bitcoin Core Dev Peter Todd, came up with the idea of taxing Bitcoin holders on their money to pay miners more for security, like we don't already pay miners in fees and there wasn't already a fee-market incentive for miners to plug in their machines or unplug when unprofitable, again another attacker trying to address a none issue with fake solutions with fear. Let me explain farther below.
Bitcoin works because of the 21M hard cap removing this would spell the end of it as hard money, tail emission is like making a small hole in the bottom of dam that will eventually grow big and make cracks until the dam falls. Why is this an attack?
Well, most people who buy bitcoin are buying it because it has a hard cap of 21million that nobody can change, that's the reason why I started paying attention to Bitcoin in the first place, so removing that already turn off a lot of us as we start pricing in future taxes or increase in the money supply, not only that, the other problem is "who has the right to print the money this time and every other time in the future? Peter said it's for security, well I want remind him that there is a difficulty adjustment in Bitcoin that always look for free market equilibrium, when hashrate is too high it goes up when it's too low difficulty goes down to incentivize mining, and if he is concern about the halving lowering rewards in bitcoin terms well again SATs get more valuable overtime so any amount of transaction fee will support the network even when all the 21M coins are mined. The issue here is if we start printing more SATs to devalue the Bitcoin overall market cap, Bitcoin price falls miners get paid less valuable money therefore less miners are incentivized to secure the network, so it would actually break Bitcoin, but let address his other arguments.
Peter also points out that the miners will collude to attack the network in a potential future, "future he can't even predict". Here again another strawman argument, asking for power so he can protect you in a future attack that he doesn't even understand if possible or not. Miners don't control the network, they may decide to pay a bunch of devs to introduce a code that benefits them but what are the chances the code ever get into everyone else node? He said well do the math it's good to do the math.
Ok, I am going to do the math, I am sure in 10 to 100 years from now 100 of countries plus millions of businesses plus billions of people will want to send some bitcoin utxo on-chain, if each block contains 5,000 to 7,000 transactions in average of 1000Sats fee each then that's an equivalent block reward of 5M to 7M SATs each, that's $500K minimum at $10Million bitcoin. So you see transaction fees can easily support the network in the future without any changes to Bitcoin. But again these people will always find an excuse to convince you why they need to print money for free that everone else have to work for, so don't fall for it.
Lastly, I want to point out that the Bitcoin limit is not a number you can change just like that because it's based on time, that's why Satoshi said he had to be very careful with the 21M number because once the network starts you can't go back and change it, you would have to go back in time Jan 3rd, 2009 to change the genesis block to change it, this core design principle is set in stone for the rest of Bitcoin lifetime and we would like to keep it that way.
of course Peter Todd doesn't really want tail emission.
he's trying to throw people off the idea that he is the real satoshi.
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Fees raising ever higher in perpetuity spells certain doom for self custody bitcoin and lighting. It raises the minimum amount of lightning that can be settled on-chain and quickly increases reasonable transfer sizes for people storing their bitcoin in self-custody. For any foreseeable future, if block sizes aren't modified to become adaptable and/or tail emissions added we will face an ever centralized and custodial future with all the fractional reserve banking, censorship, debanking etc. that comes with that. I'm deeply curious to hear counterarguments to this.
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0 sats \ 6 replies \ @ek 25 Jul
Fees raising ever higher in perpetuity
please explain
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100 sats \ 5 replies \ @anon 25 Jul
Each halving reduces miners reward from an increase in supply. Assuming equal demand for transactions, this increases transaction fees to cover the lost mining reward. If we desire for the market cap of bitcoin to rise while maintaining or even increasing the amount of decentralization, then transaction demand rises. Transaction demand increasing while mining reward decreasing ensures that transaction fees keep rising if these premises are met.
One way to resolve this scenario is to increase block size as transaction demand increases, this fits more transactions on the same block thus nullifying the increase in fees assuming the size increase is proportional to transaction demand increase.
Another way is tail emissions, ensuring a basal layer of mining reward ensures that the transaction fee remains a supplemental reward instead of the sole reward. This is extremely unlikely to be implemented as you've pointed out, it changes the BTC monetary policy fundamentally.
I hope this answers your question, I welcome any corrections or counterarguments.
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0 sats \ 4 replies \ @ek 25 Jul
One way to resolve this scenario is to increase block size as transaction demand increases, this fits more transactions on the same block thus nullifying the increase in fees assuming the size increase is proportional to transaction demand increase.
are you familiar with the common arguments against block size increase?
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100 sats \ 3 replies \ @anon 25 Jul
Yes, I wish that each block could fit infinite transactions in 1 byte but since we're space limited we must weigh tradeoffs.
I'm more in favor of a dynamic block size similar to Monero, this can be tuned to adapt to spikes in demand and balance blockchain size and fee cost adaptively.
I'm always open to superior solutions, though, if you know of any I'd love to hear them.
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0 sats \ 2 replies \ @ek 25 Jul
I'm more in favor of a dynamic block size similar to Monero, this can be tuned to adapt to spikes in demand and balance blockchain size and fee cost adaptively.
how does a dynamic block size have better trade-offs than increasing the maximum block size?
I'm always open to superior solutions, though, if you know of any I'd love to hear them.
I don't
I disagree completely with that. You're thinking linearly in one way, on-chain transactions will still be possible to regular people there is no need to implemente money printing to debase Bitcoin. Debasing Bitcoin is a far bigger issue, at this point txs are free because what you are sending is worthless
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0 sats \ 1 reply \ @anon 25 Jul
Transaction fees are about $.50 these days, depending on time of day, obviously. What happens when they are $5.00? Well I'd argue any transaction <$20 would be unthinkable, and anything up to $100 would be rare. Anybody DCAing into self custody would need to keep their funds in their CEX for even longer. Anybody using DEXs like Bisq would be priced out of smaller transactions.
This situation looks real grim in the advent of $50 transactions (assume today's money for all of these prices). People keep their money in CEXs for much much longer, probably only withdrawing into self custody every few thousand dollars worth, if even. The Bisq market would likely be devoid of sub $1000 transactions.
Another factor too is the safety of the lightning network. As it stands now, in case of dispute, channels can always be resolved on chain. When transactions are $0.50, at worse you lose $0.50. When transactions are $5 or $50, you stand to lose a lot if there are bad actors trying to double spend or other attacks. Transaction fee decreases lightning security as it stands NOW, but I'm hopeful innovations like channel splicing, sidechains, etc. could resolve this threat.
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Let the free market resolve those issues, the more you try to fix one thing, 10 more other things will break no doubt. This is why most of these fixes are bigger problems down the road
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stackers have outlawed this. turn on wild west mode in your /settings to see outlawed content.