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102 sats \ 2 replies \ @optimism 18h \ parent \ on: Where will transaction fees be this time next year? mempool
1sat/vb was intended as "no lower limit", if I remember the discussion at the time correctly. It just turned out that that wasn't the actual limit. The limit is (technically) 0 sats per tx, and if we take into account "no zero fee" policy, 1 sat per tx.
We can't translate it into dollars because bitcoin is dollar-agnostic.
I'm not sure I understand why you say bitcoin is dollar-agnostic.
If mining fees are only relevant insofar as they convince a miner to put the transaction in a block, and if miners have most expenses in denominated in fiat, 1sat/vB can provide more income for a miner in 2025 than in 2015 (of course, difficulty goes up too, but the increase of Bitcoin in fiat terms may or may not outpace difficulty increases). So at the least, mining isn't dollar agnostic.
But I suppose it's not the miners who are paying the fees. Any rise of Bitcoin in fiat terms affects fee as much as it affects the value of the sats being transacted. Which is your point that bitcoin is dollar-agnostic.
However, what I want to question is our feeling that >1sat/vB signifies demand for "meaningful transactions" while <1sat/vB does not (I may be misunderstanding your original comment, but it's a feeling I share in this form). Clearly, there is some level of fee rate that would be too high for anyone to meaningfully interact. I've certainly always assumed that 1sat/vB was well below this level, while maybe 10,000sats/vB gets near it. But This conversation is making me realize I've never thought about why I believed that. What if 1sat/vB is actually closer to the upper bound of reasonable fees than we previously believed?
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Its hard to mine with bitcoin only liabilities because of the supply chain for miners and many forms of electricity and construction being fiat denominated.
However, that is still externalized. There is nothing preventing an end to end supply chain including electricity in sats other than "adoption".
I can't remember the time when you couldn't buy an antminer with sats, though I remember that the group buys early on were dollar denominated.
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