This notion is becoming the Bitcoin equivalent of the rapture, something people believe is always around the corner, but never happens.
All the facts on the ground must lead one to conclude it is never going to happen in a sustaining way. Past incidents that could be construed as supportive of this idea were in hindsight acute, secular, anomalies.
The graph shows it gets less likely every day, which is supported by the following:
There may be 2 scarcities, but only the more scarce of the two can be the actual bottleneck. The real scarcity is in the base unit.
Bitcoin is not divisible, and it is not evenly distributed. Distribution is getting more concentrated over time, not less, as it begins to reflect real-world wealth concentration.
This lack of divisibility and increased concentration, combined with dust limits, and non-zero fees being necessary to exercise sovereignty whilst incurring the downside of key management, means there are not enough PEOPLE that CAN use Bitcoin to fill the blocks.
Bitcoin only scales to maybe 200M as a function base unit supply, not throughput. When you consider these 200M key holders are largely institutions that execute transactions in batches, it looks even worse for block space demand.
Given the math and facts-on-ground, why do people still believe in the fee-pocalypse
Scammers selling "scaling" solutions play a part, convincing naive and unsophisticated users that they are non-virtuous, calous poor-haters, if they don't support the latest crypto-theater to "scale"
The more reasonable concern is the security budget, but this too is unwarranted when put under the microscope.
Mining for profit is itself a phenomenon created by an ephemeral combination the security subsidy and stranded resources that are quickly being reclaimed by AI compute.
With the security subsidy evaporating one block at a time, and stranded resources no longer being stranded, mining must inevitably return to where it began... non-institutional mining.
People mined when Bitcoin was worthless, you couldn't sell it to pay back your electric bill or credit card debt for your CPU. They did it to secure their belief and to arbitrage potential.
But Bitcoin is now in a much better place than it was then for at-loss mining, people will mine to secure their wealth and bypass censorship just as nation-states float navies at great cost to protect trade. Mining will become more distributed as waste heat becomes the primary dividend, every homes water heater becomes a miner.
Blocks will be mined at a paper loss, and Bitcoin will be better for it.
This notion is becoming the Bitcoin equivalent of the rapture, something people believe is always around the corner, but never happens.
All the facts on the ground must lead one to conclude it is never going to happen in a sustaining way. Past incidents that could be construed as supportive of this idea were in hindsight acute, secular, anomalies.
The graph shows it gets less likely every day, which is supported by the following:
There may be 2 scarcities, but only the more scarce of the two can be the actual bottleneck. The real scarcity is in the base unit.
Bitcoin is not divisible, and it is not evenly distributed. Distribution is getting more concentrated over time, not less, as it begins to reflect real-world wealth concentration.
This lack of divisibility and increased concentration, combined with dust limits, and non-zero fees being necessary to exercise sovereignty whilst incurring the downside of key management, means there are not enough PEOPLE that CAN use Bitcoin to fill the blocks.
Bitcoin only scales to maybe 200M as a function base unit supply, not throughput. When you consider these 200M key holders are largely institutions that execute transactions in batches, it looks even worse for block space demand.
Scammers selling "scaling" solutions play a part, convincing naive and unsophisticated users that they are non-virtuous, calous poor-haters, if they don't support the latest crypto-theater to "scale"
The more reasonable concern is the security budget, but this too is unwarranted when put under the microscope.
Mining for profit is itself a phenomenon created by an ephemeral combination the security subsidy and stranded resources that are quickly being reclaimed by AI compute.
With the security subsidy evaporating one block at a time, and stranded resources no longer being stranded, mining must inevitably return to where it began... non-institutional mining.
People mined when Bitcoin was worthless, you couldn't sell it to pay back your electric bill or credit card debt for your CPU. They did it to secure their belief and to arbitrage potential.
But Bitcoin is now in a much better place than it was then for at-loss mining, people will mine to secure their wealth and bypass censorship just as nation-states float navies at great cost to protect trade. Mining will become more distributed as waste heat becomes the primary dividend, every homes water heater becomes a miner.
Blocks will be mined at a paper loss, and Bitcoin will be better for it.