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12 sats \ 11 replies \ @kepford 22 Oct 2023 \ parent \ on: "If all the people around tells you that you’re drunk - maybe you're just drunk" bitcoin
I've never heard people saving gold called free riders. Also never heard this characterization of Bitcoiners. Seems wrong to me.
I've never heard people saving gold must keep gold mines working - just to preserve the value of gold that they already posses...
keeping completely unprofitable gold mines - as working, just because the amount of gold they are able to mine - is negligible now in the comparsion to the past times...
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You are making an argument against something I'm not saying.
My overall impression of his arguement and yours is that there a many variables that we can't know and therefore it is not hard to come up with a scenero where theres a problem we do not have a solution for yet. How could we.
Assumptions. That mining would be unprofitable. We dont know the cost of energy the value of bitcoin in relation to that cost. We also do not know the volume of transactions as well as the fee levels.
Then he jumps to another crypto... Well there are many issues with that move that most bitcoiners already see so it seems this is coming from a misguided view of the soundness of bitcoin.
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Profitability is immaterial, as is BTC price. All that matters is that less subsidy means increased incentive to reorg previous blocks rather than advance the chain in an orderly fashion.
If I can get 1 BTC to advance the chain or 5 BTC to reorg the last block with the most expensive transactions already there plus the most expensive ones in the mempool since then, then the game theory securing orderly advancement starts to deteriorate.
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Isn't there more to the game theory than this one angle? This view seems to discount other factors.
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There are plenty of other factors I can think of, such as out-of-band payments, but they only serve to worsen the outlook. At the end of the day, miners are mining blocks to get BTC, and reducing the subsidy reduces their incentive to do that in the expected, orderly fashion.
If I'm missing something, please share so I can put my mind at ease. Until this is ironed out in my mind, I cannot be a 13%-er.
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Your concerns are legit, so I don't know how to put your mind at ease. But one thing you haven't mentioned is that if miners start fucking with previous blocks as a general strategy, the value of btc in general is likely to go into the toilet, which means they'll be killing their golden goose. That's another element to consider, and why this is so hard to reason about with anything like confidence.
What I think you can reason about is that everything we currently know suggests that paying for reasonable levels of security is likely to be a problem, and something will have to be done eventually. Throwing a wide net around what that 'something' is would be a very good thing to start to do in earnest.
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Yes, I agree on both points, but I also think your point about decreasing value of BTC would be a second-order consequence and the naughty miners would already have their profits in the bag. In today's advanced marketplace, these "miners" may not even need to own ASICs, since they can purchase hashrate to scalp large fees - without a subsidy, hashrate becomes more malleable to the highest bidder. Likewise, a decreasing BTC value could result in fewer miners, which lowers the difficulty for reorg shenanigans to be successful. So I actually think the worse BTC performs, the easier it becomes for nonsense to carry on.
I think your second point is really important, and I'm glad this thread has been quite civil because I know it can be a sensitive topic. I would really like to see discussions about contingency plans because I think these issues can be very "gradually and then suddenly" in how they manifest. Having a community consensus around possible ways to handle it and maybe some math/models and/or code skeletons to test/simulate would be really beneficial.
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The ecosystem is so complex now that playing out the game theory is beyond my ability. You could be right wrt miners and their purchased hashrate. I don't have a good feel for it.
I'm glad this thread has been quite civil because I know it can be a sensitive topic.
That's the beautiful thing about SN, you can find this kind of discussion. You have to look and curate it somehow, but at least it's there!
Having a community consensus around possible ways to handle it and maybe some math/models and/or code skeletons to test/simulate would be really beneficial.
Consensus is almost certainly too much to ask for, but how amazing would it be to have a bunch of detailed writeups, w/ code, simulation results, etc? From what I believe about human nature, these wouldn't persuade anybody, or reduce the idiocy, but once the shit hit the fat, having these well-fleshed-out ideas, complete with code and some data and concrete artifacts, would be a huge boon.
I think future bitcoin development, esp when its under duress, is likely to be a complete garbage-can model, and knowing that should allow us to prepare (and, eventually, react) sensibly.
That's the most simple way to handle it:
If we would have four years long network difficulty regression - then it's emergency, and new code handling such danger - should delay halving to the next halving, until difficulty will recover
if there is no such emergency situation - there is no trigger, and old and new code would work together like a charm = so there is no hard fork at all
simple, conservative (and beautiful) solution in my opinion, so it fits to Bitcoin very well
such solution above is fueled 100% by free market only
and the natural inflation level is set by Bitcoin itself, on some certain, completely unpredictable level
(and that's why I'm not sure we would be able to apply any math/model here)
We dont know the cost of energy the value of bitcoin in relation to that cost.
But does the security of the network even depend on that?
I think it only depends on how much hash rate a malicious entity (such as a government trying to destroy Bitcoin) can control in relation to the total hash rate.
Let's say the US gov wants to destroy it. If the energy prices rise by 10x, the hash rate will drop, which may make the network seem more vulnerable to attacks, but the US gov's hash rate will also drop, keeping their share of the total hash rate (and therefore the network's vulnerability) constant.
Unless they can somehow control the use of energy through coercive legislation enforced effectively.
In other words, it depends on the level of centralization of power in the world. Which bitcoiners like to believe Bitcoin will decrease (along the lines of what "The Sovereign Individual" predicts...)
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"You are making an argument against something I'm not saying."
No, I just modified argument that you said - to show you better the difference between gold holder and Bitcoin holder.
Bitcoin is going from the one edge case (infinity) to the opposite edge case (zero) with the inflation, I hope you agree.
Show me any example of a healthy system, which is staying in the middle of the edge case, please.
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