Bitcoin Forum

So basically there's some people that theorize about what will happen in 2140+ (to put the extreme scenario in which no further Bitcoin will be generated, but this should be hit in practice way sooner due very low inflation rate) when no longer there will be more BTC issued, so then the question remains to be answered:
How will miners find an incentive to mine blocks if there is no block reward left?

Some people claim that the transaction fees will be enough. Others say that the price will be so high that there will be not enough transaction volume for this to compensate miner activity (then again wouldn't the high fees be enough incentive?).

Well what if the fees are not enough, or there are not enough volume tx going on, or anything else? Would non-monetary use cases like Ordinal inscriptions solve the problem? I imagine in the future blocks will contain massive amounts of second layer transactions and it will be a settlement layer 1 network only. The fees will be very high, so maybe between regular transactions + other use cases it will be enough to keep miners working?

I have been trying to decide if ordinals and basically anything but monetary transactions are a massive amount of time and resources, or perhaps they would actually help with the miner incentive structure?

Obviously, the top priority should always be monetary transactions, then if that wasn't enough, the incentive could be filled with non-monetary transactions. Perhaps at the protocol level, make it so that monetary transactions go first, then with less priority process non-monetary transactions. We should consider if ordinals can be saved or not long term, if these use cases could deliver something useful. If they will only bring problems, then perhaps a full frontal attack on them and planning to stop them may be best. But im still open to discuss this before I pick a side.

Look at testnet3, and try to use your CPU to mine something there. Then, you will find your answer.

They are enough on testnet3. Why wouldn't the same situation repeat on mainnet? Those networks are very similar, just 20 minute rule is one of the main difference between them, other things are pretty much the same (which is also the reason, why test coins got some value, even though they shouldn't, and why they often behave better than some altcoins).

You cannot take all of your coins to the grave. Sooner or later, people would need to spend their coins, because if their plan is to never move them, then sending all of that to OP_RETURN will achieve the same outcome.

Then, people will abuse 21 million coins limit even further than today, and that would "solve" the problem. Because note that even though we have altcoins, they are not all pegged into existing coins. They usually create additional supply, which abuses the system. If you have 21 million BTC, but if BTC has only 50% domination, then the situation is the same, as it would be with 100% BTC domination, and 42 million coins.

No, they would create the problem instead, for example by raising fees sooner, than they should, and taking down regular payments. It is not only about the incentive they bring to the miners. It is also about the incentive they removed, by discouraging people to transact, when they saw some mempool stats, and switched into other payment methods.

Assuming bitcoin is still used in 2140 and there is no mining rewards your question is whether miners can sustain only with the fees from transactions right?

It should be or miners will stop then the difficulty reduced but still the blockchain will just go on, and ordinals are non-monetary is a 'subjective' word because there is no difference between ordinals or an actual transaction, it's someone willing to spend high fees due to hype up the network but you can look at the mempool (https://mempool.space/) they are not capable of doing that forever cause they are simply burning their money for some shit which just gained attention in short term and in my opinion it won't even be there for another next 5 years.

Then mining difficulty will drop, until remaining miner can mine at profit with lower difficulty.


No, unless block usually isn't full.


With current way of Bitcoin protocol, miner can choose any transaction they want to include in a block. In practice, miner usually include as much as transaction as they can starting from transaction with highest fee rate. Forcing miner to prioritize certain transaction would be difficult for various reason, such as each node have slightly different mempool.

Well, first let's see the current blocks (post-2024 halving), and see if we already can draw some conclusions.

If we take out the fee spike near the halving and the OKX spike, then most of the time the fees are hovering around 10% of the total block reward in both waves when Runes cluttered the network (including subsidy and fees), and 5% in low-fee phases (when no such event occurred).

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/06/13/ccyE1.png
Source: bitbo (https://charts.bitbo.io/fees-percent-of-reward/) (blockchain.info charts currently don't work for me)

That means that if block subsidy was cut off completely, then the hashrate would probably drop by 90 to 95%, from currently around 600 Eh/s to perhaps 50-70 Eh/s. You may say that's dramatic, but that is approximately the hashrate Bitcoin had in 2018/19 (see this chart (https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart)), and Bitcoin was considered safe at this time too.

This would be basically the situation in 2140 if the Bitcoin price was the same than today (65-70k) and the transaction activity was the same too.

@vjudeu's comments about testnet would indicate something very similar: even on testnet there's a significant hashrate even if there's no real block reward.

However I think there is perhaps a problem: mining difficulty could become more volatile, because in bear markets usually transaction rate drops and thus the fees drop too. What I think will happen is however what already today happens when there's an upcoming halving: miners diversify their operations, for example offering services to AI and cloud companies, and server colocation.So miners would find a way to survive - and take into account this is a very gradual process. Hashrate would probably however then get lower in bear markets. But the hope is of course that Bitcoin's volatility will be much lower at that time, as it will be an established financial asset.

I believe in the future merged-mined sidechain rewards could become a significant income for miners. That's also what some people like Paul Sztorc (who proposed Drivechain, an interesting sidechain mechanism) wrote.

As for tokens like Ordinals/Runes I think other blockchains will be more attractive. Take into account that Ordinals/Runes were/are mostly a fad phenomenon, at least on Bitcoin - they came from the idea to "have an NFT on the OG blockchain". It is very unlikely that this fad will continue for more than 100 years ...

This whole question is wrong because you are only focusing on a tiny insignificant thing (fees) while there are a million different things that are much more important. For starters in 100 years from now, Bitcoin may not even exist. The cryptography used in Bitcoin is going to will have been obsolete for years by 2140, so by then Bitcoin either will have had significant changes (hard forks) that would fundamentally change it or a more probably thing is alternatives will have been invented that replace Bitcoin.

As for fees, people don't tend to use a payment system that is expensive. If that becomes regular in Bitcoin, it would kill it. That means it stops being used by regular people for payment and it will lose its "hype" and subsequently there won't be any reason for scam attacks such as Ordinals to be using the "bitcoin name".

Disagree. The fee structure is a fundamental pillar on Bitcoin. Without that incentive there is no one to process blocks which contain transactions. As far as the cryptography being compromised, that is a problem that everyone will face eventually. And yes, that may be the first time a hard fork has 100% agreement, I mean that is a clear Schelling point in benefit of all Bitcoin holders.

As far as high fees, people will just use 2nd layers. Unless some impossible to imagine alternative is invented that is so good that people want to migrate their money there, Bitcoin could perfectly exist in 100 years. This is a software, it's a digital asset, it's not some physical thing that has to be replaced. It's interesting to think about the far future and see what will happen. I believe BTC is here to stay unless a major discovery is made that like I said, invents something that we cannot even imagine now.

You're talking about 2140 but I would be worried much sooner, unless you believe the market cap will double after each halving.

Two more halvings and the security of Bitcoin could be in great danger due to economical factors and before this happens we will see higher centralization due to less companies mining it.
The tx fees will not be enough and block reward will be too small, if you can't see it - you're blind.

There are only two solutions to this problem:

.1 Switching to tail-emission and forgetting about "there will only be 21m" mantra.
.2 Switching to PoS (which will make it even more centralized)

Tail emission quick summary:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRwSqM0YBto (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRwSqM0YBto)

Another problem is the Bitcoin project competition, mining companies don't care about the project and securing it, they only care about profits.
So why would they buy another batch of power hungry ASIC's if they can buy a lot of general purpose CPU's and mine with them more profitably ?
Add the fact that you have more resale value of this CPU's, better warranty, etc.

Numbers will speak and if Bitcoin price craze stops, this companies will reevaluate their mining business and alternatives.

If they see they can have double the profit mining with CPU's on a stable enough project... they will switch in a blink of an eye.
They could as well trade to BTC if they want, but the matter is - security of Bitcoin will be in danger.

Some hints about current Bitcoin mining profitability (or rather lack of it):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCFwmJXx7dc (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QCFwmJXx7dc)

It will only get worse as the electricity costs rises and more mining taxation come.
If nothing changes, there will never be 21m - So the mantra will die anyway along with the project.


If you're gonna use second layer solutions, you can as well use PayPal.

If there will be a decentralized way to handle much more transactions per second than today, it can as well be incorporated into first layer.
Centralized "solutions" are not solutions and LN has failed in this regard.

It's a shame "hard fork" term was even invented, because before that we just called it "Update" and all software needs updates.
Due to this protocol code stagnation, right now I don't see bright future for it.

Maybe someday it will change but it could be too late.

PS. I know I sound very pessimistic but it's safer to be incorrectly pessimistic than incorrectly optimistic. 

I think it will happen anyway, probably as an altcoin. And then, in the future, those altcoin users could even burn some overprinted coins from tail supply, to raise the price.

Again, another good candidate for some altcoin. I wonder, if some people coming from ETH want to deploy some stuff on BTC, because they don't like PoS. Before Bitcoin, we already had Proof of Stake. It is called fiat, and existed for years. And Bitcoin raised partially from that, after what happened in 2008. So, I wonder, if people will go back, when Proof of Stake will collapse again, and the cycle would repeat again?

Because if you have an ASIC, then your blocks are stronger. In BTC, there are many places, where one, two, or something up to six confirmations is sufficient. But if you have something, that can be mined on CPU, then it requires much more confirmations. For testnet3, people require for example at least 100 confirmations. And for many altcoins, it is also the case: You have less power? Then you need more confirmations.

Second layers are there not only to replace the main solution, but also to bring more features. For example: if you have LN or sidechains, then you can remove data, if they are deeply confirmed on the first layer. If you have only one layer forever, then you can never delete your data. So, do you want to live in 2140, and still download all historical data, starting from 2009? Or maybe you want to say, for example "data below 2100 are deeply confirmed, are grandfathered in, and should never be reorged again". We already had some upgrades, which have exceptions in the source code, because it was easier to add them (for example duplicated transaction hashes), than to re-mine the whole chain, to reorg hundreds of blocks, and to invalidate previously valid coinbase transactions, which were already spent.

So, to sum up: my advice is simple: you want tail supply? You want Proof of Stake? Go on, do it. Test it, observe it, make your own conclusions. And remember: nodes can leave and join the network at will, so you can always return, if you conclude, that your ideas were wrong. After all, even coding a bad idea is something, which can be used to improve your skills, and get some new experience.

This is not true, more confirmations on other chains come from different problems and you can have 0-conf transactions when it comes to some altcoins, I have paid numerous times with 0-conf.

Mining hardware has nothing to do with how many confirmations are needed and ASICs certainly does not make it stronger (rather weaker due to more centralization).

One project that I use has 10 confirmations needed due to privacy reasons and more hashrate/ASIC's wouldn't solve it.

Bitcoin requires less confirmations - 6 but time between blocks is 5x higher (10 min) vs 2min and 10 confirmations of the competition project.
So we have 60min vs 20min on non-ASIC chain when it comes to confirmations.

If the fees are not enough, it will be because there are not enough transactions to compete for the block space. In that case, the system will stop operating:

This will have the following consequence: Ordinals will switch to another protocol, with transaction structure that is not biased by the Bitcoin protocol.

We should never censor or discourage any valid transaction that does not fit our description of Bitcoin, no matter what. The only objective factor that defines which transaction gets into the next block is the law of demand and supply.

Where is, in your opinion, the limit between "secure" and "not secure"?

As I wrote in my last post, the hashrate would probably go back to 2018/19 levels (90-95% less than now) if the complete block reward was cut and the BTC price was like today. It will be a bit higher due to Moore's Law and even could be higher than today for this reason but as hashrate is not the relevant factor for security but the "attack cost", the security will definitely be much lower than now (in 8 years Moore's Law based hashrate increase should be * 4 approx. without increased attack cost).

But: Is that not secure enough?

Just a small comparison:

Bitcoin today has a block subsidy of roughly 200000 USD (65000$ * 3.125 BTC). Transaction fee income is about 10000-20000 USD per block. A block is generated approximately all 10 minutes.

Litecoin has a block subsidy of roughly 500 USD (6.25 LTC * 80$), 4 blocks per 10 minutes, so the miner income is about $2000 per 10 minutes.

So LTC has only 1% of the current Bitcoin subsidy, and in addition there are no relevant transaction fee rewards. The LTC reward is also much lower than the BTC transaction fee income. But it is considered safe enough for many exchanges to accept deposits of less than 24 confirmations (24 confs are equivalent to 6 Bitcoin confirmations, i.e. "one hour of confirmations"). And it is also safe enough that financial companies are basing regulated products on it (e.g. the CoinShares/ETC Group ETPs).

Litecoin can also serve as a model to see what could happen if the long term price increase is not pronounced enough to balance the subsidy decrease due to halvings. Miners income is thus now less than some years ago.

So in general I'm a bit more optimistic. I think Bitcoin is now much more secure that it needs to be, and after several halvings more, it will be likely that it is still secure enough - probably even in 2140.

We can only speculate for the near future not 100 years from now. And we already have the history to work with.
For example 10 years ago miners were being paid 25BTC per block with nearly no fees but that was a $5,000 reward.
Today they are being paid 3.125BTC and even without any additional fees that is like a $200,000 reward.

That's been more than enough incentive.
In the near future (like next 10 years) people all agree that price rise will continue. So there is no valid arguments left there for "incentive for miners" either.

I disagree.
First of all for a secondary layer to function well and give people incentive to use it, the primary layer that this 2nd layer depends on has to work smoothly. People aren't going to be able to open channels and settle them easily if the fees are outrageously high.
Secondly if you checked the LN stats over the past year, there has been drops in usage (number of open channels, capacity, etc.) each time that the Ordinals Attack was at its peak and had caused a huge fee rise. That proves my first statement.

This is true and a bit scary, because one of their goal with this is to destroy medium players (small are already dead).
Higher hashrate does not always mean higher security, as security comes mainly from decentralization.
If only few players control majority of the hashrate, I would say it's not secure at all and the project is at the mercy of the regulators.

Remember China ban on mining when in 2021.05.13 65.5% of hashrate disappeared in little over a month ?
Another threat is the inevitable black listing of transactions forced by government on miners, as if the tainting wasn't enough.

The security of the Bitcoin is in hands of the few companies, if profitability drops or they find something more profitable to mine then Bitcoin network will be doomed.

After each halving the centralization is growing as more mining companies get out of it as reported by several sources.

So I'm still very pessimistic when it comes to Bitcoin security in the upcoming years and if nothing changes then I'm 100% sure that this project won't last more than a decade.

I wouldn't compare Bitcoin to much lesser projects when it comes to security as there is much more at stake and someone will be willing to attack it with higher budget like state actors from North Korea.


When the balance between decentralization and hashrate is broken, we have seen a huge increase in hashrate but we can't say this about decentralization.
In fact, decentralization has been dropping for quite some time because smaller players can't compete in this model.

I just don't believe a trillion+ market cap will magically double after each halving, and that's what is needed for this to work.
It's unsustainable.


And yet, profits back then were much higher due to much lower difficulty.
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-mining_profitability.html#alltime (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-mining_profitability.html#alltime)

Hint: Profitability - It's not going up.
And there's nothing wrong with it until it hits the wall of no profit.

1. It is not all about mining: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_is_not_ruled_by_miners
2. Big server farms:

And note one thing: most users will not mine in the future. They will be "client nodes".

3. If you have 51% in any Proof of Work system, then you no longer compete with other miners. You compete mainly with yourself. Going above 51% simply means, that you produce more Proof of Work than needed, and you make your own blocks harder to reverse, than anyone else's blocks. Which also means, that not only it is costly to compete with you. It is costly to also reorg your own chain, which you mined.

Some example: you have regtest-like network, but with difficulty adjustments. Is it profitable to run some ASIC here, and have blocks with 64 leading zero bits? Obviously not. Reorging that would be costly not only for your competitors, but also for you. Which means, that if you are a regulator, and you find out in the future, that "hey, this decision was wrong", then you would need to reorg your own, very strong blocks. Because if you don't, then the truth will be written in the chain, and shared with every non-mining node.

The article talks a lot about breaking consensus by miners and that it can't happen but I'm talking about regulators forcing miners to use black-listing (not including certain tx) in a block, which doesn't break the consensus.

Here's some more info on this subject:
https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/bitcoins-battle-with-ofac-compliance/ (https://thebitcoinmanual.com/articles/bitcoins-battle-with-ofac-compliance/)


Here are interesting stats about current regulators impact on Ethereum:
https://www.mevwatch.info/ (https://www.mevwatch.info/)

Suppose regulators force the miners of their country to blacklist certain transactions. What happens with miners outside their borders? They cannot force their behavior. The anti-censorship miners will normally mine any transaction, and the pro-censorship miners have the choice to either accept the chain with the most work (which would make their blacklisting pointless and financially damaging), or blacklist the most worked chain if it contains blacklisted transactions.

Since the former is not an option, good luck with convincing the miners to attack the very essence of Bitcoin.

Marathon is already blacklisting transactions and it didn't split the chain.

The tx will be mined by different company but the problem here is that it's already happening and other miners could be incentivized if not forced, to join this OFAC compliance.

I don't remember how this incentive would work, there's somewhere article on it - if I find it, I link it.

Even if just 1% of the hashrate remains anti-censorship, it has a high chance to produce 1 block everyday. That's enough to clear the mempool from all blacklisted transactions every day.

The only way to censor Bitcoin is to attack it, which incidentally will affect your own income either directly through waste of electricity or indirectly through capital devaluation.

*anti-censorship, makes sense...

I disagree with this logic.

First, if "they" (I guess you mean the big mining companies like Riot, ViaBTC etc.?) find something more profitable, then difficulty will go down, and it will become easier for smaller players to enter mining again. Decentralization in this case will probably grow, although more slowly than in the past due to higher entry barriers.

Second, this will be a gradual process. While halvings are unique events, the consequences are different for each miner, depending on its exact business model (e.g. if it relies more on cheap electricity or on other scale effect, on speculation [HODLing] or not, etc.). So the most likely scenario is that if some big miner retires from the business or goes bankrupt this would be first good for the other mining companies as the difficulty pressure will be lower (hashrate will probably grow more slowly), and will help them to stay in the business.

There is only one factor I could be a little bit more afraid of - if a country becomes too dominant, then an event (be it a new tax, a ban or a sudden rentability problem) driving out miners from there could drop hashrate again like during the China ban. However, the US has currently probably around 35-40% of the worldwide hashrate, so in the current situation it would be less of a problem than in 2021, and 60% of the current hashrate would be still "secure enough". But such events could be problematic in the far future when the attack cost has lowered. So I share a bit your concerns about decentralization problems.

But I anyway expect a change in miner behaviour in the next 5-10 years. As electricity cost is about 70% of the cost of each Bitcoin mined (for the miners) and renewable energy share is growing around the world, I expect to switch them slowly from a 24/7 mining model to a model where they use a wholesale energy tariff (these are becoming more common now) to benefit from very low prices in times of high solar/wind production and thus at least turn off their gears voluntarily when energy is expensive, mining e.g. only 70-80% of the time but to a even lower price than now (< 5 ct/kWh is easy with this strategy, even < 3 ct is feasible. i.e. better than the famous Riot agreement of 3.5 ct). This model is much more likely to be adaptable all around the world (the "duck curve (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_curve)" is starting to look the same in several countries), so mining could decentralize again due to this evolution. This is controversial and has been disputed by some forum members, but they haven't convinced me that my thoughts are wrong.

There is also an additional point. Bitcoin mining companies are basically server farms. In periods of low profitability, they can diversify their income sources offering servers for other cloud services. This is already been done by most big mining companies, and it is also one of my reasons why I think that if profitability drops there will not be a "big hashrate crunch", but a very gradual process, because bigger miners will slowly dedicate more percentage of their farms to other cloud services once their hardware becomes unprofitable, instead of going offline completely. And that will re-balance with difficulty growth again and again.

IIRC, what you're suggesting is already a reality in Texas.

Miners there don't work 24/7/365, but only when the state has a surplus of energy.

When there's high demand for energy (during heat waves or harsh winters), they switch off ASICs.

Why should we trust them? Are they the sole arbiters of truth or what? ::)

I've been saying for a long time that BTC + renewable energy + AI (to manage the energy distribution grid faster and more effectively than human beings) will be the ultimate combo until 2050 at least.

How it started:

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/bitcoin-consume-more-power-than-world-2020/

How it's going:

https://www.instagram.com/worldeconomicforum/reel/C35FfRytPtJ/

 ;D

Net Zero/Greta fanatics still cannot believe that Bitcoin/PoW is more ecological than they thought! :D

Imagine if BTC was centrally planned (like ETH) and switched to PoS:

https://cleanupbitcoin.com/

Bitcoin will help speed up the green energy transition. Few people understand this (even among the BTC community, let alone no-coiners). ;)

ps: I'm not saying Satoshi invented it for this purpose, nor that WEF had this planned from the get-go.

The hashrate is constantly rising and it has risen massively. That means mining has to be increasingly more profitable to create that incentive for people to join the mining scene by making that commitment and investment every year.

Yes, it's beginning, but I think it's still a 95-99%-on model. AFAIK those miners only turn off the gears in periods of extreme demand surplus, when they're "ordered" to turn off operations by the electricity distributor, as a condition to benefit from energy credits (Riot case).

Anyway, I think soon we'll start to see miners doing the same but voluntarily chosing their on-/off-cycle due to them using the wholesale price (i.e. participating in auctions in the energy exchanges themselves, or with access to a tariff which follows the wholesale price - something already available in several European countries even for retail energy consumers). By the way this method would even stay relatively attractive if the "DAME" mining tax is implemented in the US, as the prices they would pay when they effectively consume would be low, and thus also the tax (Anyway I don't like the tax concept, above all own renewable generation should be always excepted.).

Of course, that's also why I will repeat this argument until somebody proves I'm wrong - but then I've no problem to admit an own error. But I think evidence is clearly pointing into this direction :)

I think you can't deduce from the risen hashrate that mining has become more profitable. Only that it stays profitable, but currently only for those who can afford efficient ASICs and cheap electricity. The hashrate increase is very likely largely a product of hardware improvements (Moore's law).

However I agree with you that MeGold666's fears are probably unfounded - if profitability was that bad we would see a slower increase.

That's a good point but that's also only one of the things affecting the hashrate rise.
Keep in mind hardware improvement doesn't happen every day. For example Bitmain released S19 miner in 2020 but then the next major improvement which is S21 released 4 years later in 2024.

BTW I don't disagree that block reward falling can become a concern regarding the incentive for hashrate to continue rising. But I don't see us there yet. I believe we are far from that time, at least a couple of more halvings are needed for it to become a real concern.
Also we definitely don't need spam attacks to increase the fee to provide that "unhealthy" incentive.

Even if this is of course correct, the "hardware upgrading process" for the miners should be in general a gradual process. Not all farms will upgrade their gears at the same time, not even in the same year. And that's in my opinion the explanation that the hashrate increase looks "gradual".

Let's see how much can be explained by Moore's law with a short calculation:

- Antminer A19 (2020): 95-110 TH/s
- Antminer A21 (2024): 200 TH/s

So we have roughly a duplication in 4 years. The hashrate however quadrupled in this time (from 120 to 550 Eh/s), so Moore's Law explains about half of the hashrate growth probably.

Of course however the other big factor is the Bitcoin price increase, but the impact on miner profitability is not 1:1 as you always have to take into account the previous difficulty increases as well (that's the reason why some talk about "production costs" of Bitcoins, even if I strongly disagree calling it that way ...). And it's a bit difficult to calculate the impact due to the cyclic price behaviour. In early 2021 the price was still much lower than today, in mid-2021 and late-2021 the price spiked to similar values than now, but with a big "valley" of 35-50k in mid-2021, and in 2022 it fell drastically again.

Fully agree here :)

This assumes the remaining 99% of hashrate won't reorg the block created by the anti-censorship pool.

That's exactly what I mean by "attack".

I don't understand why in the name of god it's 2024 and we still cling to things like hashrate is going up, everything is fine the networks is more secure, and we ignore when it comes to security basic things about mining, things that guys like Burtw mentioned decade ago!!!
Quick example of why hashrate on its own is just a useless metric, so, assuming attackers need 10 billion (number pulled out of my *) now at 600exa that means back in 2013 at 400th/s you could have attacked the network with $10k? No!

So why not go the easy path of doing things, best case scenario:
- all miners are ar 3cents kwh, we completely ignore ROI, last day read was $27,476,575.85, let's round it up to 30 million, so that's 1 full TWH a day, your best efficient gear at the moment draws 85kwh so we can feed with this 11 million ASICs worth 50 billion! Nice one!
Bad scenario:
- we no longer have rewards, but Bitcoiners are spending like nuts so the fee is not 1 mil but 5 mils, all miners have 4 cents per kwh, but they also have a ROI of 2 years on the gear so we're down to 125Gwh, before ROI so with that we need additional 8$ per day per gear , so we're down to 400 000 asics being the maximum of economically viable, and that's 2 billion! Still out of my pocket reach, we're safe!
Worse case scenario:
- fees are the same as now 1mil, kwh is at 5, adding expenses keeping 2 years ROI, and we can't feed more than  70 000 asics worth 350 million.

350 million to attack a destabilize a network worth 1.4 trillion, cheap, expensive?
The good part in this is, why would Buttercup do this? Or Kim Join Us! Or the reptilians and the bildenbergs!  ;)

Oh my bad, forgot in the worst-case scenario the attacker might not want to buy the most expensive gear but a cheaper one in cost of TH/s/$, so in head to head battle you won't need $5000 of gear to overpower a s21 you would do it with s19 that are selling for almost scarp on the market for $1800.
Which would bring down our scenario from 350 million to 126 million  :D

But why would anyone who feels threatened by Bitcoin spend twice the wage of the CEO of JP Morgan on killing it.... ;D

Peter Todd has actually been entertaining that idea of adding a tail-emission or extending Bitcoin's inflationary period indefinitely. But it's going to be very hard to convince the community, and many people believe that the network has ossified to the 21,000,000 total coin supply. But perhaps if the situation will be life or death for Bitcoin, the community might start to entertain a discussion of a tail-emission.


POS doesn't work.

https://youtu.be/NYPGub6XzjE?si=YnAFxEvDmKdsudAx

If the diff drops, so will security - small miners will join but the security will never be as high because this small miners will never be as profitable as large scale miners and the network will be at constant threat of state sponsored 51% attack from North Korea or some other sources because it will not be enough to secure a trillion+ dollar network.

Which means the mining will be even more centralized than today, more power in the hands of few.
This is not good for many reasons, one of which is Government control - possible forcing of OFAC rules on mining company or straight out ban like in China.
In this situation network will again have low security.

Bitcoin mining is done on ASIC's, not on general purpose CPU.
No one in the world needs this power aside from Bitcoin and other, less profitable coins running on SHA-256.


It would split the community for sure, the discussion should be done now as this tech should be running on Bitcoin years ago.
It will be too late for any action when problems arise.


Here's an interesting info on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw6aMxaNmXA&t=416s (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sw6aMxaNmXA&t=416s)

I suspect that hashrate was increasing only because mining companies wanted to eliminate competition.

Currently we can observe a ~30% drop in network hashrate:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#alltime (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#alltime)

https://i.postimg.cc/JzCnCgCN/Untitled.jpg

I was warning in my other posts that it's a matter of time until this big companies reevaluate their mining business and switch to more profitable projects, and it's already happening:
Source: https://cryptonews.com/news/bitcoin-miner-profitability-halving.htm (https://cryptonews.com/news/bitcoin-miner-profitability-halving.htm)

Remember: There's no love in this industry, there's only $$$ and they have great financial advisors.


Even fewer people understand that green energy is not green and it also produces waste.
Solar panels have a life span, batteries have a life span, electronics that run it have a life span, and nothing of it is degradable or recyclable.
Other "green" solutions are even worse...

The greenest solution is nuclear power plant, snowflakes will disagree.

Here is some information to all the glorifying disinformation propaganda circling around "green" energy when it comes to solar:
https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power (https://hbr.org/2021/06/the-dark-side-of-solar-power)

The whole green industry is a scam to earn $$$ for companies who produce this waste.

We can argue all week about it but I let the time show it's madness.
I'm out from the forum for a longer while as I have some work to do, see you when the roof starts collapsing (if nothing changes to the Bitcoin protocol).

It's interesting that you just mention North Korea, weren't that the guys making billions with Bitcoin hacks and ransomware? ;) Why should they destroy their source of income?

Anyway: again, where is the limit between "secure" and "insecure"? Was 2019 hashrate secure enough? I believe a state actor could possibly currently carry out a short 51% attack if he wastes a lot of taxpayers money, but that wouldn't be disruptive enough to destroy Bitcoin, more like what happened to some altcoins. Even dictatorships need to justify their actions at least a bit to avoid becoming unstable, and it would be really hard to justify such a waste of money.

I think we agree that a centralized mining sector would not be good, but I just explained why I don't believe that your logic here is correct, just a paragraph before. Yes, the difficulty lowers in this process, and so does security. But it is still safe enough.

That is not the point. The point is that the housing/cooling infrastructure can be used for CPU servers as well. And that is already been done for some years. Many US miners are already diversified.


No, that's only 30% if you take the highest single value and the lowest single value. The drop is about 15% and that's expected because it occurred in each halving until now (see 2020, 2016 ...). It will grow later this year probably.

Neither the waste nor the energy needed to produce solar panels, wind turbines, hydro facilities etc. compensate the energy they produce.

Those that really understand about the subject know that there is some waste but that this is not really a problem. There is no free lunch (still). But recycling tech is advancing too, and household waste is still a far bigger problem than silicon which can be used for landfills.

It's funny you mention nuclear energy as being better because ... well, didn't they produce waste?

Ah ok. :P

Is your mission currently failing? ;)

By the way I'm not against a tail emission, the Monero folks are doing well with it and I think it's a reasonable model, but in the case of Bitcoin I don't think it will ever materialize due to the "ossified" 21 million limit, and I also don't think it's needed.

No, it didn't!  ;D
The halving in 2016 was in July, we had just a 5% drop in August.
The May halving difficulty history looks like this:
so a bit harder to find a pattern there, oh, the adjustment wasn't on the -15.95 it was on the -6  ;D

I seriously don't understand on what you base your recovery enthusiasms, other than maybe being completely bullish on the price, miners don't care about charts, we care about income per $ spent on electricity, and this I how it looks now:
The best of the gear launched now and available makes you 11$, burns 84kwh and costs 6k,2 years ROI on zero costs.

I was pretty bullish on the growth myself, but the end of Q2 is coming and a lot of contracts will probably expire, only the big guy with dirt-cheap energy will keep on mining.

Also, in terms of network security it's the same in both cases:
300 exahash when the bets gear was the 19 with 100th/3kwh and $5000
600 exahash when the best gear is the s21 with 200th/3kw and priced at $5000

Hashrate without the cost per th/s and the amount protected is a bit meaningless!

While you're correct that in 2016 the pattern was weaker (a >10% drop was present but only for a short time, about 2-3 weeks, so you could say it did not leave the normal fluctuation range), in 2020 it was in the same order of magnitude than now:

https://talkimg.com/images/2024/04/11/juMo2.png
Source: Coinwarz (https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart)

There was of course before the March "hashrate crash", so the halving drop looks like "one drop more", but this one was clearly caused by the price crash due to Covid, leading probably to a short panic in the mining sector too, because if the price had stayed at $5000 or less with the incoming halving the drop would probably have been even harsher. What I can't explain at this moment is the sharp November drop (this was ATH time in '20 ...).

btw: Is your quote related to the 2020 hashrate evolution? If you mean the 15% drop was earlier (or later?), there always can be some delays, in either direction.

My recovery expectation is not based that much on price expectations but mainly on gradual continuous hardware improvements plus rising longer-term average price, see my answers to @pooya87 above.

With the rest of your post I more or less agree. It is possible that recovery takes longer if for example Riot runs into difficulties. But eventually a new equilibrium will be found. Let's see how it plays out. At least I don't think the hashrate drop caused by this halving will be as large as the one in 2021 caused by the China ban.

A new trend in miners (at least PubCO companies that im tracking) they are moving to HPC services, mostly for companies that use AI. Core Scientific just got a 12 year contract with CoreWeave, so that's a solid source of income. IREN is also planning to announce some clients and they are building infraestructure with HPC on mind. WULF as well. There are others like CleanSpark and Riot that choose to remain pure Bitcoin miners. Im ok with diversification of MW if they can leverage this properly in order to continue to remain profitable even during long bear markets, so when the bull Bitcoin market is back they will have more power ready to mine. We'll see what model turns out the best.

-5, not >10!



I only count difficulty adjustments, daily hashrate is just all over the place, completely unreliable!


End of China's rainy season!
Short story, cheap hydro energy during the rainy season, end of October-November, gear gets shipped back to inner Mongolia to feed on coal, it was an annual occurrence!



Equilibrium could be found even at 5 exa and price per BTC at $600, but I have a feeling in terms of security nobody would be happy about it!

@stompix: Ok, thanks for clarifications. The >10 was referred to the approximate 1-week average of daily hashrate, not diff adjustments.

Difficulty adjustments is indeed a better metric than daily hashrate. But difficulty until now fell only 5.1% since the maximum in April according to Coinwarz (https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/difficulty-chart) (88.1 T to 83.7 T). I guess it will fall a bit lower in the next adjustment but I'm still not convinced it will get lower than -15 or -20% from the pre-halving maximum.

Again, let's see :)

What I however don't understand is why you think that this time it's different to previous halvings and recovery will not occur or be slower than in 2016 and 2020.

If we look at the 2024 halving from a reward perspective, it was less devastating for miner income than 2016 and 2020, because the reward is already so low that transaction fees are increasing their share, so it's no more a 48-50% income reduction but more close to 40-45%.

But let's explore the possibilities a bit. One argument could be the stagnant price evolution since April, but a strong counter-argument is just 2016, when the post-halving price evolution was stagnant for a long time, basically until November/December, but hashrate/difficulty recovery was very fast. In 2020 we also had much more bearish conditions than now in 2024, if we take into account that the price in 2019 had reached almost $15.000 and at halving date was around $10.000, and also there was price stagnation for some months (and the real bullrun only began in November).

Another argument could be that the current hashrate is "inflated" due to publicly listed mining companies like Riot who diluted their shares but are probably mining on a loss actually, i.e. operating close to a "ponzi" but preserving a high hashrate. This would be more convincing for me, as I already wrote in the last post. But does that apply to all bigger miners? I have some doubts here.

Edit: If I understand your posts well then your argument is that "attack cost" variable is going to lower with each halving, as hashrate could be going up but the attack cost not. I sorta agree here but don't think it will come into dangerous territory as long as we have significant transaction fees.

Yes, miner diversification is definitely an interesting evolution. It could lead to more income stability for mining companies but the hashrate could stay relatively volatile, because it's easier to simply change hardware than to set up or dismantle entire mining farms.

Income! That's the problem!
I mined at 45 cents/th back in 2021, I could take a 66% drop because I would still be profitable even at 15 cents/th.
If I would still have mined at 10 cents/th (before halving) and got even a 33% I would be losing money!

Income at 45 cents and expenses at 8 cents/ths means a cut of 50% I still make 18cents/s profit!
Income at 10 cents and expenses at 8 cents means that a 50% I'm in red by 3 cents!


A lot of different things, profitability was still higher by 40%.
The s19 was shipping in May after a shitton of preorders because it was outperforming the s17 from 0.045j/Gh to 0.034j/Gh.
The summer had cheap energy from China, which is not here anymore see the power curtailing in the US now .
ROI at 0 costs for the s19 was still just over a year, not two and a half years for the s21 as now.


Well Riot has never made money, Stronghold is for sale, Core is taking a $75m loan not to enter bankruptcy again, Mara is sitting on 600 million of debt and "investors" money.....


Exactly, each halving when the price doesn't double means less security overall, and even if does double it still means 1/2 security to market cap.
As for the fees, they are 4% of the reward, if you expect people to pay 30 million for 400k tx day, well, how can I say it... don't!  ;D

Thank you for this post, I now understand your arguments better.

Basically so your point is that in the last halvings the profitability was much higher than now and miners had margin to "manage" the halvings with minor adjustments to the business model, While now the margins for miners are much thinner, so with every income problem (like halvings or price crashes) there's danger to lose larger parts of the hashrate without immediate recovery. So it's basically what I meant with the "inflated" hashrate.

I still don't see this as critical for Bitcoin's wellbeing / security, at least not in the short/mid term.

If the assumption is true, then the mining market was never really mature: Until 2021 we may had seen a market with lower supply than the optimum (and thus high profitability margins). It's possible according what I read in the forum and other communities that this was mainly caused by hardware shortage - there were less gears available than people willing to mine. And according to this assumption, we are now in a phase with a higher supply (of hashrate) than the optimum, with several miners mining at a loss.

The consequences would be that we could see a sharper hashrate drop, but in general this would mean that the market would be maturing and that would be in general favourable for Bitcoin because if we see really a major hashrate drop this year, this will probably not happen again then so easy and the curves would become smooth again. Miner diversification into housing / AI / HPC is a sign of that business models are evolving to more sustainable ones.

The problem that halvings are still a reduction of security vs. market cap of course remains, I never disputed that. This is of course also the root of the big block/small block debate or of ideas like "Bitcoin should go PoS" or "tail emissions". My argument is that if nothing changes, we could lose 40-45% attack cost vs. market cap in this halving, the next time it will be closer to 30-40%, then 20-30% and so on because fees will make up a larger portion of the income even if the fees in USD stay constant.

But we could improve that equation with models like merged mined sidechains (higher throughput for the same fee level -> slightly higher cost for miners but much larger attractivity for users -> higher usage -> higher price -> higher overall security).

I am in the same opinion as d5000. The total hashing power may have reached a major saturation point that some miners, especially the unprofitable miners, may need to turn off their ASICs until there's a more "favorable situation" - but that probably will not last very long either.

BUT there's another argument. Because we know that miners could be speculators too, it could also mean that they will add more hashing power if they think that Bitcoin's price will surge, no?

Let's not forget that higher fees (in BTC terms) are a result of higher transaction count, if Bitcoin will be used only for big transactions as some say then of course transaction count will be smaller than what we have today and thus the fees will be smaller.

You can't expect to have more big transactions than small transactions we have today.

How do you expect Bitcoin miners to survive on fees and too small block reward then ? the only way for this to work is the FIAT evaluation doubling after each halving.
That's a big gamble on the network security.

This mining companies are already switching to training AI models as there is more cash to earn, they will not bet hundreds millions of dollars on future Bitcoin growth when they can earn it today from different investments.

Bitcoin mining is quickly becoming thing of the past, current landscape is AI.

Does anyone really believe Bitcoin will be alive 10 years from now if nothing changes in the protocol ?

Bitcoin mining companies have farms of ASIC miners which are designed to only do one job, to mine Bitcoin. How can they offer other cloud services? If they had GPU mining farms (which isn't profitable and as far as I know, everyone is on ASICs), then they would be able to rent their GPUs to AI labs and anyone who wants to use it for AI.

It's basically a fight. The one who surrenders the last, keeps playing. It's really very interesting.

No one is going to attack Bitcoin. Simply it doesn't worth and is completely meaningless. In fact, it would be one of the dumbest thing that humans could ever possibly do. What if they attack the Bitcoin network? The code is here, there are countless number of altcoins, if Bitcoin falls, another coin rises and I don't believe someone is going to spend billions of dollars every time a coin is created. Also, too many serious companies are involved in adopting and integration of Bitcoin and too much money is put into it, we talk about trillion.

This mining companies are already switching to AI, it's worth for them to buy new hardware which they would have to buy anyway for Bitcoin as new generations of ASIC come along and kill old generation profit to the ground.

Source: https://time.com/6993603/ai-bitcoin-mining-artificial-intelligence-energy-use/ (https://time.com/6993603/ai-bitcoin-mining-artificial-intelligence-energy-use/)


If the security (diff) drops significantly, anyone will be able to attack it with a botnet for 0$ cost.


The money will dump faster than it pumped and only very rich will be able to escape this Titanic in time due to temporarily extra large fees, small investors will not have enough for fees when this panic starts and will be able to withdraw only after all the big investors money is gone.

Rich people feel safe knowing they will have priority on rescue boats when shit hits the fan, if you have less than $1m in Bitcoin, you're not on the VIP list.
If you have it, you'll be lucky to get 1/10th of it as it will be a fast fall, people in crypto space believe in 10x up but not in 10x down but it can happen and 10x is basically death for Bitcoin.
Some will still hold it at this low levels and get eaten by market manipulators who will pump and dump it, some will hold it regardless and die on this iceberg.

https://i.postimg.cc/7678Pm4n/St-wer-Titanic.jpg

The problems are already arising but people are like frogs in a slowly heated water and they're not realizing it's already boiling...

If Bitcoin falls to a 51% attack POW is dead! So in case of a revival, every PoS coin is at an advantage! And we have an incentive for ir already!
Also, I think you've mistaken the code for open-source projects and the ability of sites like torrent websites to come back with investors losing a few hundred billion on it. It's one thing to see an exchange go down it's a different thing to see the entire ecosystem being fucked up!

Second, you can't have a thing worth a trillion, a new revolutionary idea that threatens the world order or any of that thing, and at the same time have no enemies  ;)


Of course not, but again, I started from the OP first post, and that has 2140 in it so all my arguments are for that!
If we debate 2030 or 2040 , that's a different thing!


Same way VISA does, not charging 100$ for each of 1000 transactions but charging 1 cent for a billion! ;)
You know what I mean but let's not go deeper cause we're going to end with the same discussion about nodes not affording a 2tb drive.

Bitcoin would be so much more if community and developers wouldn't be so stubborn on keeping protocol at certain version.

There would be no need for altcoins to exist, there would be no need for convulsed Lightning Network.
The price would be way over 100k today because it would actually be used instead of horded by people wishing for it to go up by not using it while praying more big investors would pump their bags, praying for more regulations instead of fighting the machine and become money that everyone needs.

Instead we have "Digital Property" with collapsing roof and idiots who cheer when Bitcoin miners who secure this "property" get their profits cut down every few years by 50%.

Imagine having a company and knowing your revenue will go down by 50% every 4 years and that you have to invest a ton of money in new hardware even sooner and the only thing that can keep your company afloat is new investors buying shares of X company* in hope other investors will do the same and they can sell faster than them.

Does it seems reasonable ?

Ridiculous, I can see why this same miners are so happy that something new came for rescue in form of AI.

*Analogy to Bitcoin, if someone didn't understand or will try to fight using words taken out of context.

There is a very apparent reason why altcoins exist: We don't need to come into one agreement, if some of us disagree with each other. Remember: coercion holds no sway in this space. I cannot force you follow my proposal for 100 MB block size. I can only implement it, and invite you to join.

Bitcoin is ingenious technology because it gives you the freedom to define it yourself. If you think Bitcoin has failed, it's because you've overlooked at this feature. But, let me ask you this question: What should the Bitcoin developers do, if not keep it "at certain version", as you claim? What should it change, in your opinion, so that it would make it thrive?

First off, the halving should stop and tail-emission added.
This approach would give more assurance for security, why it's in danger with current scheme I have already explained.

Block size should be dynamic and not static so the fees would not skyrocket and block poor people from using or even withdrawing their money.

If this two things were fixed, Bitcoin would make sense as an alternative to fully obfuscated chains.

PS. I know anyone can fork Bitcoin and make changes but starting a new PoW chain with no premine, no dev-tax etc. would be very hard to secure if not impossible today, maybe with merged mining it could survive.

No! This logic is flawed.

To get to the point that people "only use Bitcoin for big transactions", fees must be much higher than now.
On-chain transactions are always the safest form of a Bitcoin transaction, compared to Lightning, sidechains and L2s. So people will always prefer on-chain when they can afford it.
In the (unlikely) case that really sidechains and LN become so popular that the blocks become emptier as a consequence, there's still the option to decrease the mainchain blocksize to boost the fee market, like Luke-jr and Paul Sztorc have proposed. (I personally think this is insane from today's point of view, but it may be an emergency strategy if things really go terribly wrong).

Yes, but it's a diversification strategy in times where the mining market is saturated and margins are thin, see also my last answer to stompix. Once difficulty falls enough mining becomes profitable again. And I'm sure that will not mean a 50%+ hashrate/attack cost drop. Let's talk about that again in a year. :)

By the way what you are aiming for (non-premined, tail emission and bigger blocks) already exists. This list probably contains some options (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5456378.0). From the larger ones, Dogecoin has tail emission (and community seems to be open for big block ideas (https://www.reddit.com/r/dogecoindev/comments/u3wc71/increased_block_size/)), XMR too, and there are a whole armada of non-premined coins where some should have also a big blocker ethos. I think you should simply support Doge and XMR thus instead of being angry about Bitcoin not following your enlightened ideas :)

Ok, that's so far away that a lot of variables will be in play and we do not even know if Bitcoin will still be needed in 2140 :)

I already wrote that elsewhere: they simply change the hardware. That's no big deal. For example, if a generation of ASICs is phased out because it's no longer profitable, in the sections of their farms they had these old miners running, they simply install "commodity" servers with strong GPUs.

Yeah let's decrease the block size so it can only fit 1 transaction and make block times longer from 10 min to 1 week...

Instead of scaling up, their "plan" is to scale down  :D

My logic is not flawed, your logic involves a lot of praying and I rather have a scalable chain than chain that lives on prayers.


People always prefer the cheaper option.
No one except purists (minority) care what it does in the background.

You don't need to start a brand new chain. Hardforking implies that you'll have the exact same chain, until date X, when your rules will start being enforced. Bitcoin Cash is an example.

A scalable blockchain is one where payments occur in second layers, not in the main layer. If you think that by simply rising the block size, you can solve the scalability problem, then you'll have to explain to me why Bitcoin Cash and numerous of other altcoins were such terrible failures.

I know you can do that but the problem of low hashrate and possible 51% attack still remains in this scenario.

It's about removing bottlenecks from the protocol and pushing scalability problem to the hardware layer.
When Bitcoin network was recently spammed even LN had trouble to work properly.

Bitcoin shouldn't be slow because code says so, it should be as fast as hardware and network infrastructure allows.
Bitcoin is outdated today and you want it to flourish 100 years into the future  :D

Then please refute my argumentation convincingly instead of using words like "praying" (in this case I promise to not continue using words like "enlightened" then ... ;D )

At least the assumption that the main chain will not lose attractivity in relation to L2s if fees lower is difficult to refute, I think.

Why is Lightning then not much more popular now, and L-BTC and Rootstock stay in niches? My interpretation is easy: the current on-chain cost is still low enough for people not being forced to use these layer2's. People don't do micropayments on Bitcoin (mainchain) since long ago anyway.

If you think that big blocks and a high tail emission (for example, if we continue with 3.125 BTC per block forever) are the solution, then how do you ensure that the following negative consequences don't occur:

1) full node centralization? (see BSV, Solana ...) (and again, this is NOT because of storage but because of relay/validation costs ...)
2) negligible transaction fees income, making miners totally dependant on the tail emissions?
3) exodus of investors attracted by Bitcoin's deflationary nature?

Problem 3 would lead probably to a hefty dump in price. And problem 1 is crucial in my opinion. If we sacrifice censorship resistance then we don't really need Bitcoin anymore. With a highly centralized network, not only censorship becomes easier but also 99.9999% of the users are forced to use SPV clients, and SPV clients can in some cases be attacked.

They will change when they have to but they accepted to use Bitcoin on chain and still don't feel to have big demand on layer 2 solutions. They can have better practice for transactions to save precious satoshis that will become more valuable with time.

The OP's concern is too far, 2140, probably we will all die on that year which is about 80 years from this year 2024. There will be many new upgrades on Bitcoin protocol and predict what will happen next 80 years is too far thinking. Like Segwit adoption, Taproot adoption, growth of Ordinals that happen only last 6 to 2 years lately.

This is one of the big issues with LN - it's not user friendly.


1 - You're worried about node centralization and in the same time pushing people to LN which in nature becomes more centralized with time.
I don't know anything about BSV and Solana so can't compare and talk about it but full nodes on Bitcoin that are running on old hardware and with bad Internet connection are not doing any good to the network aside from nice looking statistics.
For example Monero has good number of decentralized nodes, not as many as Bitcoin but that's not due to too high requirement (I run full node on my 10 year old laptop no prob.) but rather just being less popular than Bitcoin.

2 - You would need to read about fee algorithm in Monero to understand how tail-emission is beneficial for Miners.
But in short, miners are always incentivized while people pay low fees, it's a win win for everyone if you're willing to accept inflation that's going to zero but never reaches zero.
The more coins there are, the less inflation there is but due to people losing coins it's practically flat inflation.
There is also wrong assumption that just because there is no limit on the cap, there can be infinite coins and this is wrong.
You know exactly how many coins there will be in existence at any given time in future because of the static emission (0.6 XMR per 2 min block time), so it's limited by time.

3 - In short term it would hurt but long term Bitcoin would be used more (due to lower fees) and gain more natural price growth which would be much more stable.
Demand for Digital Cash is much higher than Digital Property for investing, Bitcoin would have much higher growth pontential and would be more secure.
We talk a lot about network decentralization but money decentralization is important too, it's better to have millions of people using network for small transactions than a thousand big sharks who control the price.

As for sacrificing censorship resistance, we are doing it right now by pushing people into second layer solutions and by creating this rough environment for miners in which only few big companies will survive, making them an easy target for regulators (see OFAC).

ArticMine talks a lot about scalability issues and how we can further optimize the code:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTj42N49jdk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTj42N49jdk)

This was recently published so it's up to date (2 weeks old), I have watched many interviews with him, he is really smart and worth time.

 ::)

Laughable, and it's obvious that you didn't think well about it before making that statement. There's more to mining than mere hashing to "win the lottery" for rewards. There's a particular dynamic between mining difficulty, the price speculation of Bitcoin, the demand for blocks, and so on. To say that it's "becoming a thing of the past" is simply WRONG. In fact, the way HashCash is utilized in Bitcoin, it's actually a thing of the future. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

You are arguing not with me but with the reality, read it again:


Source: https://time.com/6993603/ai-bitcoin-mining-artificial-intelligence-energy-use/ (https://time.com/6993603/ai-bitcoin-mining-artificial-intelligence-energy-use/)

This is happening at ~60k USD price evaluation, if it drops any further you will see a large drop in Bitcoin security.
Current levels of hashrate are a bubble due to the price being a bubble for so many years.

You may hysterically laugh all you want, it won't change a thing. This is current reality.

The thing I don't understand from your perspective is: why can't we have all solutions? Do you like dynamical block size? If yes, you don't have to mess with Bitcoin, there's Monero. Are you willing to trade scalability with protocol privacy? The answer is again, Monero. Do you want better scalability and decent levels of privacy? Litecoin. Do you not care about having a hard cap? There's a host variety of altcoins to choose.

Bitcoin has clearly charted another course. Its aim is not simply to facilitate transactions on the main layer but to enhance its role as a medium of exchange in second layers, while striving to become the cornerstone of honest and true money. Its most compelling feature is its finite supply, which is sustainable through sufficient transaction competition on the main layer.

I can respect that, that's why I'm using Monero and not shilling it to anyone.

We're here discussing the future and the sustainability model of Bitcoin which I think is broken and if nothing changes then after two more halvings Bitcoin project will be totally unsustainable.
We can already observe it's shortcomings and slow demise.

It's just a friendly discussion with fellow cryptocurrency enthusiasts, I'm not pushing anyone to do anything.  ;)

Bitcoin was a revolution, without it Monero and other projects would not exist because no one even thought it's possible.
It sparked a lot of ideas.

Since you're sure about the future, answer me the following question: how can Monero scale? Verification is very computationally expensive, and will only get worse overtime. And the funny part: it is used much less than Bitcoin. Currently, there are just 180 transactions in the mempool. What happens when more people acknowledge its usefulness?

In March, the network experienced a black marble flooding incident within a day, with just over 100k transactions (https://monero.observer/monero-daily-transaction-new-ath-100k/). In the scenario where more people join, syncing a node might take weeks, and that's when loaded on a modern computer, not on Raspberry Pi.

To me, it seems like a good enough temporary privacy solution, but absolutely not for long-term global adoption.

Was it black marble attack ? no one knows for sure, what we know for sure is that it was not enough to make any assumptions as the "attack" was too small for too short time period.

Initial syncing takes time, even on Bitcoin when we talk full node, full blockchain on BTC network weights about 3x of XMR.
So what tx on BTC is smaller if average user needs to make multiple transactions in order to make it semi-private, thus in the end still having worse privacy than on Monero and using a lot more bytes on the blockchain than a single Monero tx.

Recently I have been syncing my new node on cheap ~$5 dollar VPS, it took couple hours on 1 Gbps connection, if you don't want to wait you can always use remote node.

"Verification is very computationally expensive, and will only get worse overtime"
There are plenty of optimizations being done in this regard and my 10 year old laptop has no problem with current version.

"Currently, there are just 180 transactions in the mempool. What happens when more people acknowledge its usefulness? "
Monero has Dynamic block size, it scales a lot better than Bitcoin as you can observe it here:

https://tx.town/v/xmr-btc (https://tx.town/v/xmr-btc)

How many transactions are waiting in Bitcoin mempool ?  ;D

As for what's being currently done, I suggest watching full talk of ArticMine I have posted eariler:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTj42N49jdk (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dTj42N49jdk)
Watch it full if you have time and then we can continue discussion, at least the second half about scalability.

Monero is all about scalability on L1, Bitcoin instead is only promising solving it in the future with L2 solutions which as of today are all failures, especially LN.

Yes Monero has bigger node requirements, but infrastructure is getting better each year and we don't want to be stranded by protocol.

Quick search gave me this:
There are 19487 Bitcoin nodes vs 12535 Monero nodes

Source:
https://monero.fail/map (https://monero.fail/map)
https://bitnodes.io/ (https://bitnodes.io/)

What was the problem again ?  :D

That's because there's a much less portion of transactions happening in Monero. If you had 800k transactions everyday, it'd be a verification nightmare. Read this comparison (https://phyro.github.io/grinvestigation/why_grin.html).

Again, that's the case, because there is orders of magnitude less activity than in Bitcoin. If the on-chain volume goes up by a factor of 100x, things would be noticeably worse. Let alone if it went up by 1000x, or 10000x. In those scenarios, it might be impossible to sync up, because verifying a block might take more than 2.5 minutes, which is the rate at which blocks are generated. 

I wouldn't call that "scaling". It's just linear growth, parameterized according to on-chain demand. It holds as much water as telling me that Bitcoin Cash is 8 times better in terms of scaling, because it has 32 MB block size. True scaling comes with transaction compression, such as using one UTXO for several off-chain transactions.

Seems like an interesting talk! I'll watch it when I find the time.  :)

Recently there has been testing being done by voluntary people on a testnet with this in mind, to stress test current version.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1doyde9/stressnet_first_week_report/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1doyde9/stressnet_first_week_report/)
So about as high as current Bitcoin charts show, I did not read the report yet but it's interesting to see how it went and hope to see even more demanding numbers.

You're right, block size alone does not solve scaling but it's a big part of it.

There is surely a lot of work to be done before it can scale to the numbers mentioned by you, but it's doable because Monero protocol is constantly evolving and so is the infrastructure of the Internet it resides on.

I think it takes around a whole day with modern hardware to finish syncing. With a total of ~43 million transactions, that's verifying ~1.8 million per hour, on average, which is ~500 per second.

This means that if, for some reason, there is an abrupt rise in demand for Monero and more than 600 transactions per second are broadcasted, ordinary users will be unable to sync with the network. You claimed that Bitcoin will not be self-sustainable in more than eight years from now, based solely on the belief that there will be insufficient competition for block space. I assert that Monero will not achieve global adoption under the current status quo, given its dynamic block size and insufficient scripting flexibility for second-layer solutions.

I wonder who's the prayer.

Well, you don't do it everyday, right ? once you sync, you keep it synced - me personally, I sync once a week and it takes a coffee break to sync.u
As of today, it takes a longer time to sync Bitcoin node from scratch as the size is much larger and downloading blockchain data alone takes longer, then there's verification - it can take several days.


600 tx per second ? you know what's the current maximum for Bitcoin is ? 7.

Monero is way more scalable today, there's no argue about it.

My point is that you can't sync, whether you've synced before or not. It becomes impossible, because you can verify up to 500 transactions per second, whereas the network is growing by more than 600 per sec.

I know, but I don't claim that it can scale on-chain. I'm big proponent of off-chain solutions because I acknowledge that there is no such a thing as on-chain solution on scalability.

Correct, but what matters, IMO, is which one is more scalable over the long term.

You're talking way into the future, when there will be this many transactions (maybe in 20 years lol) then infrastructure will be much faster as well and Monero has no protocol limits, only hardware limitations so with time, it all comes together - you would know if you watched the talk from a much smarter man than I am.


You want to build on top of Bitcoin with it's limited small block size ? LN has proven recently that it can't work when L1 has larger transaction count like we have seen with Ordinals spam.


Well, Bitcoin is not scalable at all as we can see today.

L1 can be scalable, don't get fooled by LN bullshit  ;)

You need a proper foundation to build on top of it, Bitcoin can't handle L2's of any kind with it's limited block space.
If the transactions on Bitcoin L1 will be high enough to support miners with fees (which I highly doubt), L2's won't work - this has been already proven by the failures of LN to work at high demand times (which were still low compared to what is needed for the network to survive after two more halvings).

Bitcoin trying to handle L2's:
https://i.postimg.cc/J7PGf8bW/girl-lifting-heavy-weights.gif
 :D

By the way, I don't know if you're aware but Lightning Network has it's own scalability problems aside from centralization problems.
But instead of actually fixing it, maybe we'll just stick L3 on top of it, the Bitcoin way...  ;D

It's a serious problem but if nothing changes to the Bitcoin protocol concerning this problems then I'll just grab my popcorn and watch this comedy-drama then come back here to say "I told ya!".
 8)

I'm not "pushing people to LN". I'm currently not even using it actively myself (after some experiments in 2018 or 2019).
But I would use it if the fee situation of late April, or some months in 2023, became the standard, at least for some transactions.
For the "becoming more centralized" assumption, yes some big blockers in this forum continue to repeat that, but that's pure speculation. I haven't seen really research on that, if you know some, then please point me to it.

"Network support" is not the only benefit a full node provides.
Their owners may use them for better privacy and more safety against some attack vectors possible with SPV clients (not that this is something an average user has to fear, but somebody doing regularly big transactions could)
Using a client like Electrum you leak a lot of information actually if you don't create lots of wallets and do a high amount of address management. So the option to use Bitcoin Core with an average PC should imo not be sacrificed.

But isn't that just supporting what I wrote? Monero nodes are much less hardware consuming than Bitcoin's currently. That's mainly because the network usage is lower. But I think that's the issue you're discussing with BlackHatCoiner ...

I think the Monero conditions cannot be simply assumed for Bitcoin. Bitcoin has much higher usage. Thus, to have the same fees you would need huge blocks.
I had in the past advocated for a dynamic but still quite small block size. But I think now the "L2 way" is more promising, because doubling or tripling block size, which would be ok still for today's consumer hardware, would not be enough really for mass adoption.
About tail emission: I already wrote it's an acceptable model for me. But the problem is that Bitcoin's value proposition currently draws a lot from the "limited supply" and "digital gold" narrative. In addition, I would prefer to not hardfork forever, even if altcoins are accustomed to that. If Bitcoin was created newly I would advocate actually for a tail emission model.
And Bitcoin can work with transaction fees only, that's the conclusion I get from all current statistics on the subject I know. For coins like LTC I guess the situation could become more critical, but LTC miners actually benefit from Doge's tail emission. :)

Myself I think the "multiple L2" model, with sidechains *and* LN (not *or*!) could bring actually much more benefit, and it would not depend on tail emissions.

But if the security situation really becomes critical, one could implement something very similar to tail emissions actually with Drivechains or other kinds of merge-mined sidechains, with a model very close to the Doge/LTC model I showed above. If each Drivechain has an own utility token which is inflationary, then the Bitcoin miners would actually benefit from merge-mining them. For this reason, if Drivechain or another decentralized sidechain model is implemented, I expect the Bitcoin miners benefitting quite well from them.

Regarding miner centralization I have already written in another post that I disagree that there's a clear tendency towards centralization. I could also speculate and say it's actually the other way around: big miners aren't flexible enough for the rough post-halving conditions. Just a few days ago I saw a new thread in the German subforum of people (real forum users, not forum users talking about something they heard "from friends"...) setting up small solar mining installations.

A heavy crash due to the "deflation obsessed investors exodus" could also go so deep that it would hurt security itself and cause a lot of chaos, maybe even it's the opportunity to a anti-Bitcoin attacker.

Thus my opinion continues to be: We should try to preserve the current Bitcoin mining model and, above all, avoid hardforks. If really (for me, likelihood is low, I'm not "praying" for it) something goes wrong and security becomes too low, then we have some time for alternative solutions like merge-mined Drivechains, and only if that doesn't work we should consider a hard fork to tail emission.

There are plenty of studies about this matter:
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225966 (https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0225966)

Statistics show number of channels are dropping for years now:
https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning (https://bitcoinvisuals.com/lightning)

https://i.postimg.cc/fLd0cDZ1/Untitled.jpg

Some interesting comments about people trying to use this clusterfuck:
https://www.reddit.com/r/lightningnetwork/comments/1d1sibt/okwhats_the_truth_with_lightning/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/lightningnetwork/comments/1d1sibt/okwhats_the_truth_with_lightning/)


At this point I have wrote everything I think about current situation in Bitcoin.
I appreciate your time, the discussion was very interesting and good points have been made.

Cheers!

But that doesn't consider the actual dynamic between the miners - who are also speculators, mining difficulty, and the price of Bitcoin. Those parts are constantly moving that lead to whether a miner adds more hashing power, or reduces hashing power. That's the current reality. Running some of their hashing power for A.I. systems "may" become part of the rotation, but saying that Hashing as a Sybil Protection Mechanism is a "thing of the past" is simply wrong. It's the future.

It will never occur if there is such a burden in verification, that's what I'm talking about. All of that, under the impression that you'll either run your own node or use a solution like Feather, but by still checking every transaction until your wallet's block height.

But, besides that part, it still cannot work for point-of-sale. No person will wait for 2.5 minutes in the line, just for their transaction to confirm. Transactions must complete instantly, which implies the existence of a second layer.

Lightning Network is not suitable for global adoption, and I don't remember it ever being portrayed as the ultimate solution to scalability, by its creators. It was just one solution, which can greatly improve scalability within a network of LSPs. Average users have a reasonably hard time using it. That's why we need a second layer that moves complexity back to the servers, like this one: https://arkdev.info/.

So you don't believe that computers will be faster 20 years from now ?  :o

Monero has 0-conf transactions, it takes not more than 3 seconds after hitting enter for my transaction to be confirmed when I'm paying for my dedicated server on impreza.host
You can't do this with Bitcoin due to RBF.

This was the notion for so many years you probably forgot, to this day uneducated people will say LN is the answer to any Bitcoin issues.

I have already mentioned that I don't want to continue this discussion, mainly because it's exhausting talking with people like you who didn't do their research and continue to talk about problems they don't understand.
Due to this I'm wasting a lot of time just to educate you how things work like with the 0-conf in Monero and I don't like wasting my time.

Cheers and goodbye  ;)

I don't believe that technology will scale exponentially, no. However, in a globally adopted scenario with reliance on on-chain transactions, I'd expect the system to do grow by orders of magnitude in terms of verification time.

0-conf is in the name. No confirmation. Any 0-conf transaction can be double-spent. If you can't see the problem of relying on 0-conf for a globally adopted payment system, then I don't know what to say.

RBF is only a local policy rule. A transaction with no confirmation can be double-spent since January 2009. That's why we use a blockchain, remember?

Right. Uneducated, and I put myself into that group. But, I can clearly see years now that lightning isn't meant to be used by the average user.

I don't see how I'm exhausting to talking to, but if that's how you feel, then goodbye.

Check the CPU frequency 10 years ago, and now. Compare it:

The thing is that by 2140 we will all be gone and by then our heirs will hopefully have received their inheritance and all the bitcoins will be in new hands. What I have read is that when the last bitcoin has been mined miners will still make money off of the fees for the transactions that still occur on the network and that will keep the network and miners running. You've got to hand it to Satoshi for setting it up this way. Back in the 1900s you had folks mining silver and gold and we are now in the Bitcoin gold rush! There are still many coins to be mined! Its kind of wild because 2140 is in 116 years and it has only been 176 years since the start of the gold rush in 1848. Look at how much gold has increased in value since then, I can only imagine what Bitcoin will be at in 2140. I only wish we could live to see what happens!

Forgot to answer here, sorry :)

Thanks, but afaik this only shows that "there are hubs in LN" and that the network would be less efficient without them. It doesn't show that there is a general tendency towards bigger hubs and that's what I wrote.
But this does not make it centralized. It's quite obvious that only a few participants will have nodes open with more than, say 2 to 4 other nodes. For most participants even one channel is OK.
That it would be a "perfect utopia" like some kind of social network was never realistic, this would also make onboarding costs skyrocket.

I agree actually with you that LN is not a perfect utopia. It's a tool, but a potentially very useful one. I consider it a decentralized prepaid system to bundle dozens, in some cases hundreds of smaller transactions (not millions!) into one. Basically what a credit card is in the fiat world, but where everybody can become a payment processor ...

This is also not showing centralization. It is simply in a stagnant, very (!) slightly retroceding state, where existing hubs may minimally increase their importance. Newest numbers hint to a stabilization. But the current adoption is also not critical because on-chain fees are still palatable. I would have expected a growth however last year during the Ordinals wave, but yeah, we may not be there yet because the tools are still too difficult to use.

By the way, that image about centralization/decentralization your shared - that's exactly what our beloved big blockers were sharing for 7 years now. :)

That's what I wanted to add still to this thread, then for me also everything has been said, at least regarding these few issues.

There is no mysterious dynamic here, lower income less hashrate, that's it!
Q2 has ended and you can see that despite newer models replacing older with better ths/joules we have still gone down 5%.
Have the coin drop to 50k and you will see how much miners care about dynamic as they shut down!

Also, miners don't protect against a Sybill type attacks, that's what nodes do!


Can you please explain how doge manages to validate 10x the blocks as Bitcoin with all this CPU limitations mumbo jumbo?
Do they use some much wow shiba CPU that are different?

Rather than keep on talking about CPU limitations how about we do something else, see what the limit of the average CPU now in verifying a block is compared to the average CPU back in 2009, cause there might be a surprise! While you're at it you might also explain to me why the mother of all shitcoin cumwrightvision didn't break with 100MB blocks!

Let's see:

Dogecoin blockchain size: https://blockchair.com/dogecoin/charts/blockchain-size
Bitcoin blockchain size: https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/charts/blockchain-size

Let's say that Dogecoin currently is at 150 GB, while Bitcoin is at 600 GB. Which means, that Bitcoin processed 4x more data than Dogecoin.

So, where are those "10x the blocks"?

They use outdated version of Bitcoin Core, so they are less resistant to some attacks. And when Dogecoin suddenly raised in value and popularity, there was a time, when the network was simply stuck, and nodes were unable to synchronize the chain.

Usually, BSV supporters think that non-mining nodes are not important at all, and they are fine, if only mining pools use full nodes. They expect that everyone else can stick with SPV nodes, so even 1 TB blocks is not a problem in that case, because regular users are not going to be independent peers in their system.

I never posted anything about the dynamic being "mysterious", but there is a dynamic. Miners are speculators too, and because common sense tells every miner that higher difficulty = less profit - and therefore an increasing number of miners will be shutting off their ASICs, then other miners could see that as an opportunity.

Plus Bitcoin's price projection.

Why not? Executing a Sybil attack requires re-doing the Proof-of-Work, otherwise the node can figure out it's surrounded by malicious nodes, since they will stop sending him blocks.

Dogecoin has 1 MB block size, and 1 minute time interval. That's the equivalent of 10 MB Bitcoin block size. So, not 10x, but 2.5x.

Besides what garlonicon said about the philosophy behind BSV, have you actually attempted to sync a BSV node? I don't know man, you might... be surprised (https://x.com/lopp/status/1577741709693403159).  ;D

Both 2.5x and 10x only true in theory with different assumption, where
1. Bitcoin block mostly contain witness data (almost 2.5x).
2. Bitcoin block doesn't contain any witness data (10x).


The blockchain size is bigger now[1] with very demanding hardware[2], even compared with running ETH node[3].

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20240630095610/https://whatsonchain.com/block-stat/total_block_size (https://web.archive.org/web/20240630095610/https://whatsonchain.com/block-stat/total_block_size)
[2] https://web.archive.org/web/20240709092849/https://docs.bsvblockchain.org/network-topology/nodes/sv-node/system-requirements (https://web.archive.org/web/20240709092849/https://docs.bsvblockchain.org/network-topology/nodes/sv-node/system-requirements)
[3] https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/run-a-node/#requirements (https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/nodes-and-clients/run-a-node/#requirements)

Are we really discussing carrots and sandwiches here?
Fact! is Doge managed to outclass Bitcoin 7 times in a number of transactions:
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-doge.html#6m
Without breaking down! And with users doing transactions on Doge because it was cheaper! Oh, and with maxis right here on the forum recommending Doge cause it's cheaper!

I will again put the emphasis on Doge, maybe some here get how ridiculous the situation has become, we're debating about a competition with a f* meme coin!!!!

What I don't understand is why after talking so much about on CPU power you don't say it, with past 2009 power we could manage 1 MB blocks, with the current processing power of the average CPU we can 2.78MB, 7.65 MB...what is the number?


If as per the topic title, the reward is gone and we see the fees at this level it means the network won't be able to fund 600Exas but 18Exa, so it terms of raw number the amount spent on gear to overpower drops from 12 billion to 360 million! Same for the power requirement!


A Sybil attack means legit nodes will be broken between fake nods that would top them synchronizing and the false nodes would broadcast only their version of the blockchain, you don't need a majority in PoW since you don't need the chain with most work, you just need to make sure the chain with most work is not relayed between legit nodes!
With enough nodes, you can launch one even with 0.1% of the hashrate, just enough to actually create a block!


So, did it break?
The tweet says only something about economically feasible, 2022! , we are in 2024 and BSV chain still works despite all the mumbo jumbo about intergalactic CPUs needed to run it!

Nobody here actually answers this:
What would be the technical restraints and how much more would cost a user in 10 years if the chain would move from 1vMB to 8vMB assuming all blocks would be full? If anyone thinks it's not possible show me the numbers!!!!


So 2.5x is sustainable? It is it 3.3x? Or is it 5.87x? Which one?

If the victim node reaches July 2024, and the attacker launches a Sybil attack on him with 0.1% of the hashrate, mining a block will take him 10/0.001 = 10,000 minutes, which is like a week. The victim can just look it up, if they notice they're stuck at the same block for days. If they don't, it's likely that their software might not even accept the block, even if its timestamp is altered to look as if it was mined a few minutes after the previous one, because the computer's clock would be far into the future. (And this would alarm the client (https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/95944).)

So, yes. That's why I don't see why eclipse or sybil attacks are so concerning. The worst they can do is network disruption. (More common if your only network is Tor.)

Even Blockchair decided to stop hosting the BSV blockchain explorer...: https://www.reddit.com/r/btc/comments/vi3ui6/the_reality_is_that_9999_or_so_of_bitcoin_sv/

You mean from 4 vMB to 8 vMB? The block size is not 1 MB, this is 2024!

I believe they're all quite sustainable, but beyond that, it'd be noticeably harmful for the ecosystem.

Once, you told me that I see Bitcoin as a "golden goose", which shouldn't change. What you're proposing has already been implemented and has a pretty active community; it's called Bitcoin Cash. You're in denial about the fact that what you're suggesting already exists. You just don't like that, financially speaking, the majority does not follow that protocol. It seems to me that you don't actually want to change the protocol just for the sake of having one with large blocks; as I said, this already exists. What you want is to force a change in behavior.

Isn't that it? If that's so, then who's really seeing it as "golden goose"?

@stompix is of course correct that Doge from time to time has a much higher transaction count and also "data throughput" than Bitcoin. However, there are two things making me believe that the Doge chain is much "lighter" than a 10MB Bitcoin chain would be.

First, let's see longer terms:
https://talkimg.com/images/2024/07/10/ocrew.png

We see that until 2023 the Doge transaction count was much, much lower than Bitcoin's, even if the capacity in theory was higher. This should have resulted also in a smaller UTXO set, and UTXOs are one of the "bottlenecks" for full nodes. The average should be quite close for the recent 2 years.

In addition Doge's "usage boost" in 2023 is a phenomenon very closely related to the Doginals (Ordinals pseudo-clone) boom. This means there were some huge transaction "waves" with "NFTs" created on the Doge chain, even more than what occurred on Bitcoin. While they have more impact on the UTXO set than Runes or the original Ordinals because they don't inscribe in a witness but in an output as far as I'm aware of, per transaction it should be lower than a "payment" transaction because a lot of the data can be ignored by validators.

In general I think a 10MB Bitcoin chain should still be ok. But it would harm the fee market (transaction fees would probably go back close to 1 sat/vByte) and thus miner income. And in addition it probably needs a hard fork, and as I wrote in the discussion with MeGold666 I think the hassle isn't worth it and L2s are a better option.

The number of transactions is quite bad estimator, because you can have transactions, which takes 100 bytes, and you can have transactions, which takes 100 kB. You can have a single-user transaction, and you can have a CoinJoin, or some batched transaction, involving hundreds of users. Should all of them be counted as "1 transaction = 1 transaction"?

A better estimate would be to count unique public keys and signatures, but it is harder to create a chart like that.

Do you have BSV node? Does your friend have it? People are whining on forum, that they don't want to run BTC full node, with 600 GB, and you want to tell them, that 10 TB is fine?

Of course, the network can work indefinitely, because as long as at least one node is willing to mine it, then it can still be alive and well, as long as people are fine with taking part in a centralized system. If you look at mining pools on BSV, it is pretty centralized, and seeing 51% on one of huge pools like TAAL is normal: https://sv.coin.dance/blocks

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_is_not_ruled_by_miners#Efficiency
Which means, that you probably won't see chains like BSV "crashing". You see them "centralizing", and becoming ruled by "10 or so individuals" (because non-mining nodes will simply not exist, and even block explorers like blockchair will stop sharing that chain with users, so it will stop being audited by anyone).

Also, let's assume that you have some SPV node, and you notice a transaction like this: https://mempool.space/testnet4/tx/914a6348ba832b79c631a6f70ea9e2c3e1e433ee0b90633d51e3fe1164c05dc0

How do you want to make sure, that those 10k coins are not created out of thin air, without fully validating the chain? If only miners run full nodes, then future blocks can contain transactions like that, but creating coins not out of fees, but out of thin air. And no SPV node would validate it deeply enough to know, that some block, 123 blocks deeper, is invalid for some reason. And then, the coin will not collapse: it will be just more similar to the banking system, where you have to trust the issuer, instead of verifying the supply.

If we're going back to that debate, then the blockchain should have other uses/different kinds of utility for different kinds of users so that miners will continue to be incentivized to secure the network. But that still doesn't say that there is no dynamic between the mining difficulty, the miners as speculators, the current price of Bitcoin, and it's projected price in the future.

We shouldn't be laughing at dick pics and fart sounds in the blockchain, we should probably be encouraging it?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Why? A batched transaction is more useful, and serves more users, than just some on-chain JPEG. And it can have the same fee, if users would be able to join their transactions. Which means, that if you will have transaction fee set to 0.01 BTC, but there will be 1k users behind it, then each user will only pay 1k satoshis for all of that.

In general, a single UTXO per subnetwork should be enough. Then, you could have some transaction, taking one kilobyte, but serving thousands of users.

It is all about compression. It is easier to compress regular payments, than some JPEGs.

If you only care about whether it break, then you might as well as use Solana as comparison. Old estimation on https://solana.stackexchange.com/a/989 (https://solana.stackexchange.com/a/989) shows all TX already in tens of TB, while storage for running it's archival node already in hundreds of TB.


The concern isn't technical restraints, but rather cost to run full node and IBD duration. And personally i feel 8 vMB is fine with today's hardware (excluding SBC such as Raspberry Pi 4).


As reminder, vMB and MB are 2 different unit. Maximum block size is 1 vMB or 4 million weight unit, where theoretically a block can reach almost 4MB in size.

Here's another argument against gigantic block size: If the blockchain grows faster than the rate you verify transactions, you can never reach the chain tip on regular hardware.

They are two different units, but we've softforked to vMB. It'd be wrong to measure things in MB, since there's an entire field which can handle more information than before.

This sounds like RFC 1918.

It's the only viable solution for scaling.

You understand I said 0.1% just for the sake of saying it, to show the actual threat!
There is no "victim" node in a sybill attack, it's an attacker isolating from miners other nodes, your node will still be fed information that will be accepted as true since it's real legit information, it will simply be cut from the other what you call "legit" block, but this block will also be legit!
I love how you dismiss things that even the bitcoin wiki treats as problematic.


And suddenly you went from CPU requirements to the size of the tx, please do tell me what the difference in CPU power needs to verify a 100kb inscription versus a 10kb one! Is it s10x?  :D


My bad, if we keep shifting through units at one point it's inevitable I would use even virtual Mbps.


Do you have a miner? I have still 3 of them! Do you have the power to run them? Do you expect people to live in houses with 10kw power draw and heat-producing louder than a Karcher industrial vacuum thing?

Are you ok with 10 companies controlling the whole mining?
Weird how the threat of decentralization appears only when we talk about nodes, when we talk about mining it's crickets!


You know what's funny?
I know 5 guys who still mine on this forum and are still active, pretty weird that their opinion is different.Why would be that?
Because it's simple, fees at 5/sat are worth 1 million a day, please don't make me do the math again for how much hashrate would that be able to keep alive, but it's 3 times LESS than what Core alone has, and 50% of what the next two big guys have!

And with this, we're finally touching the subject!

Instead of you all criticizing me and the block size, do you guys have a solution for this longterm as the title says?

The issue is simple
-fees are right now 1 million a day
-efficiency is around 20w per th, at 5 cents kwh it's 2.5 cents per day
-used gear is for sale at $5 per the th/s

Do the math on how much is needed and tell me how impossible it would be for someone targeting a 2 trillion market to do it!

And of course, nobody promoting PoS coins would even think of launching such an attack cause it won't .....
How much profit do you think bagholders from ETH would gain when the leading PoW coin is attacked?

Verification is similar, as long as both are just huge OP_NOPs, which are never executed. However, in 100kB transaction, you can fit more OP_CHECKSIGs, than in 10kB. And if you increase the maximum size of the block, without changing anything else, then you will make some attacks worse, than they currently are. For example: https://bitcointalk.org/?topic=140078

Which means, that if you will have an inscription, in the form of:
Then, 100kb inscription is definitely worse than 10kb one. The same with 1-of-3 multisig flood, which we can sometimes observe, where a single key is real, and everything else is just used to push some data (but it also slows down verification, because OP_CHECKMULTISIG has O(n^2) complexity).

New units will be there, if new compression algorithms will be deployed. Because if inscriptions will be abused, and if some node owners will be sued, because of transmitting copyrighted materials (like in torrents), then more and more people will think about data compression, and removing those inscriptions from IBD. Then, instead of an actual inscription, you may download a proof, that it hashes to a particular value, without actually storing it, and accessing the content. Would you also tell everyone in that case, that "1 byte = 1 byte"? Would you tell everyone, that "200 OP_REPEAT OP_CHECKSIG OP_ENDREPEAT" should be counted as "five bytes", even though you would pay the same price for processing it, as you would pay for 200 OP_CHECKSIGs?

I only mine with CPUs.

Not everyone has to be a miner. The whole reason why non-mining nodes are important, is because they are peers in the P2P network, while SPV nodes are only "visitors", which can only attach to other full nodes. And as long as SPV nodes can be fed with false information, and we don't have any kind of "SPV-alerts", then we have, what we have. In general, P2P full nodes are trustless. SPV nodes are based on some level of trust, that simplified proofs are correct, so they are based on a weaker security assumptions.

No. Bitcoin is not miners-only blockchain. If it would be, then we wouldn't have a single coinbase transaction, but instead, every transaction would work like a coinbase, and every user would get some fractions of the reward, depending on their hashrate. But Bitcoin does not work in that way.

No, and I am trying to change it. In general, if we would have decentralized mining pools, instead of the currently used centralized ones, then those companies would no longer "control the whole mining". But it is hard to avoid "big server farms" scenario.

Of course, data compression. As long as we don't have transaction joining, people can only shout about increasing the size of the block. But they don't see that if transactions can be joined, then you can increase TPS, without changing the maximum size of the block.

I have already proposed a solution several times -> merged-mined sidechains. This would basically be the same thing as tail emission, only that the tail emission goes on on different chains, not on the main chain.

I personally like the Drivechain model, but it's not critical for me, if a sustainable dynamic federation concept, a working ZK rollup concept or whatever is found, then I'd say ... go with it. That's also why I opened the L2 observer thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5496743.new#new), although the current situation is still not satisfying, but there are some projects which could be described as "a start".

Judging from the fact that Ethereum dipped in the Goxcoin panic too even if ETH didn't even exist in MtGox's times, and also the German BKA didn't sell a single ETH, the impact could even be negative for them. ;)

I really don't understand what I said that was so wrong, but anyway.

To me, simply running a node does not contribute to the decentralization of the network. It merely enables Bitcoin to function as intended: peer-to-peer cash without intermediaries. If you need to trust someone else, it indicates we are heading in the wrong direction.

Do what? Attack the network? The entire concept is based on the fact that such an action would be completely irrational. Not that it is, and will always be, infeasible.

this is a good point. I can send 1-999 usd via Zelle in under a minute for free.

Why use BTC ?

Now Zelle is not world wide like btc is but it is cheap and fast to do.

I can do up to 2500 but I need a fee more checks to go over 1000 to 2500

It depends on what you wanna do and where you're located.

For EU/SEPA, Revolut is a better option.

Bitcoin is a global, unified payment system/standard (unlike SEPA vs SWIFT vs PayPal etc.) and currently fees are low enough (https://mempool.space/) to send let's say $1000.

Just like TCP/IP is a global networking standard (that wasn't always the case, back in the 80s/90s we also had BBS, AppleTalk, IPX etc.)

Bitcoin is HTTP
Monero is HTTPS

  ;)

If you want fair and honest money, there can't be hidden information. Everything must be transparent. We don't know the supply, the amount of premining, etc
Bitcoin is the best money people have ever used, completely transparent and completely decentralized, money without inflation. When you start using bitcoin as an everyday means of payment and when you no longer need to exchange it for fiat currency, you will have the privacy you desire
We don't need any shitcoin, nor is it possible to create a better bitcoin.

You can check Monero supply by executing one command in the daemon.

Bitcoin for everyday means of payment ?  :D :D :D are you out of your mind ?

The mining hardware has improved by 8x since 2018. Back then miners were using S9 which was able to produce 14Th/s with 1373W of power. Now with the S21 XP HYD you can get 473Th/s with 5676W of power. S9 = ~0.01 Th/J and S21 XP = ~0.08Th/J. So effectively, 50-70Eh/s hashrate now a days is actually equal to 8-10Eh/s in 2018. Also the market cap of Bitcoin is 4x higher than in 2018. So to have the same market cap to security ratio you would need 4x the hashrate/power consumption of 2018 hashrate. So if the hashrate did fall to 50-70 Eh/s then the security of the network in relation to the market cap would drop 24x

It shows how his knowledge lacks...
Or he is putting disinformation on purpose to protect the Bitcoin image  :D

It was safe at that time because it was technically and economically difficult to operate another 30-40 EH/s back in 2018. In today's world, that's the worth of a single farm. Of course, that doesn’t mean if we drop to 50 EH the next month, someone with 30 EH would attempt an attack on the network. It would be very difficult to make a profit from an attack of such kind, unless done for the sole purpose of damaging Bitcoin, like a government or a huge bank.


That's one assumption. The other assumption is that when it becomes cheaper to transact on the blockchain, more people will start to use it.

My take on the subject is that increasing the block size will happen at some point in the far future. The main excuse we had to delay that was the fact that many blocks were not even close to full. This is changing quickly, which means there is more constant demand for block space than we have available. Obviously, I am against something as extreme as BSV's infinite block size, but something closer to what you suggested would do just fine, in my opinion.

One reason why a block size increase hasn't happened and won't happen soon is that CHANGE is hard. Some people can’t imagine how difficult it is to change a tiny part of a local live app, let alone a huge change in a massive decentralized ecosystem like Bitcoin. There will be a lot of work involved, many risks, probably drama, and even death threats. Whoever wants to pursue this needs to lobby for months, convince all the pools and major players to accept the change, and assure them of a smooth transition. In other words, it's going to take some serious guts to do so.

Nothing will change, Bitcoin will remain speculation bubble and nothing more.

Just use Monero.

It is only limited to the coinbase transaction. You have no proof, that there is no Value Overflow Incident, like this one: https://jonasnick.github.io/blog/2017/05/23/exploiting-low-order-generators-in-one-time-ring-signatures/

+2

Not only that but it's about the price also
When the S9 launch at 14 th/s it was $2100 , means $150 per th/s.
Bitmain is dumping the s19k pro for $11 per th/s, used gear probably is down to $5-7 maybe? Mikey might know better about this!

So in terms of building gear for the attack compared to 2017 you need at least 14x the hashrate!


"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"

It's not extraordinary to claim that Bitcoin is irrational to attack, but feasible nonetheless.

Yes, this has all been already discussed. Hashrate is not the same as attack cost, and pehaps this sentence in my post was indeed misleading in implying security would be "as high as" 2018/19, even if this wasn't what I meant. But yes, I should have searched the point in time where attack cost would be as high as if today it would fall by 90-95%, taking into account hardware improvements. I was simply too lazy :)

But let's do that so the numbers are again correct:

- If we assume hashrate cost was 8x higher in 2018 than 2024, then the hashrate/USD ratio increases approximately 40% per year, or decreases about 28.6% each year we go back.
- Taking this formula we assume thus that for 2018 values, the attack cost of a network with 6 Eh/s would be the same than 50 Eh/s "if we cut block rewards completely in 2024" (which is of course a completely hypothetical scenario)
- Let's go a year back to 2017: The same "attack cost" than in the 95% reduction scenario would be equivalent to 4 Eh/s. The network surpassed 4 Eh/s in April 2017 according to Bitinfocharts (https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#log&alltime).

So regarding attack cost, ignoring market cap, the network would probably be as safe as early to mid 2017. In other words: a no-reward Bitcoin with all values of 2024 would be approximately as "cheap" to attack as the Bitcoin network in early 2017.

If we take market cap into the equation then we'd have to go back to late 2014. [1] Yes, this is significantly earlier than 2018. But: was Bitcoin that unsafe back then? Also market cap does not necessarily increase the potential benefit for an 51% attacker. The USD value per block would be another measure to take into account for example. And also market depths for potential shorting gains ...

And it's very much a worst case scenario. As I wrote before, my "ideal" scenario would be a sidechain-backed tail emission plus fees.

For sure it's possible that the "economically ideal" block size could become larger in the future. I actually agree with you here: if the cost to hardfork wasn't that high -- see the drama it caused in 2017 -- then I would also support a slight blocksize increase. But the L2 scenario looks more attractive for me, it would be basically what Ethereum is trying to achieve with sharding.

@anarkiboy: It's not Bitcoin vs. Monero, it's Bitcoin & Monero ;) By the way: Are Monero folks like you becoming hostile against Bitcoin lately? And why? ETFs?

---

[1] In 2014 market cap was ~1% from now (wildly swinging), hashrate was only 0.002% to 0.015% from 2024 (in the order of magnitude of 10-300 PH/s, it was growing very fast that year). Attack cost/hashrate ratio would be 3% of now in 2014 according to the above formula, thus the point would have been reached approximately when hashrate was at 0.03 % from now, or approximately 150 PH/s in August 2014.

Bitcoin suppose to be Digital Cash.
Monero is Digital Cash.

See the difference ?  ;D


No, you're wrong. It's not only for the coinbase, it checks everything due to cryptography it can check without knowing transaction amounts.
You must be really desperate to link outdated bug, should I link you too to Bitcoin inflation bug ? choose which one because there are more than one.
If inflation bug happened today in Bitcoin even temporarily it would crash it to the ground.

Your math is probably correct, but the logic is flawed. To keep things simple, let's use some easy-to-work-with numbers:

2018: Total hashrate 10 EH > 5 EH or more needed for a miner to attack
2024: Total hashrate 100 EH > 50 EH or more needed for a miner to attack

If you cut 2024's hashrate down to 10 EH, it would be ten times less secure than it was in 2018. Simply put, acquiring 5 EH, which was 50% of the total hashrate in 2018, was significantly more difficult than acquiring 5% of the hashrate today. The same logic applies to the cost, infrastructure, and availability of mining gear needed to perform the attack.

Acquiring enough mining equipment to control a majority of the hashrate is a significant barrier. In today's context, with a hashrate of approximately 600 EH/s, obtaining 300 EH/s worth of mining power is logistically and economically impractical due to production and power constraints. It's not just the cost; it's the production and power constraints.

The largest farms on the planet, like MARA, which runs roughly 35 EH, are striving to push that to 50 EH by the end of the year, so even the largest Bitcoin miner couldn't attempt an attack. Even with unlimited funds and support, they simply can't achieve that scale. Conversely, if the hashrate dropped to 50 EH tomorrow, it would enable companies like MARA, RIOT, Bitfarms, and others to attack the network on the go without needing to acquire more hashrate.

I also don't understand why market cap or block rewards have anything to do with this. A 51% attack on the network doesn't mean the attacker would make more BTC than they could otherwise "legally." An attacker would only achieve one of two things:

1. Double Spend

2. Damage to the Ecosystem

In both cases, the incentive remains the same regardless of the price of Bitcoin or the block rewards.



What $7? I can cut you a deal for $3.5 if the quantity is large :D.

So, using d5000's numbers of 2018, achieving 6 exahash cost $300 million, with the price per terahash (TH) at $100. This represented 50% of the total hashrate back then. Today, 25 EH, which is 50% of a 50 EH network, costs $87.5 million.

While the overall cost difference isn't huge, the practical feasibility is starkly different. Currently, 250,000 miners (for 25 EH) can be easily sourced from various places like Telegram groups. In contrast, in 2018, the 214,286 S9 miners needed for the same attack were simply not available. Even Bitmain didn't have that much stock at any time. Moreover, the 400 MW required to run these miners and the necessary space were not accessible to anyone.

Yes, that's all taken into account in my simple formula. That's why I admitted that the security could be compared better to 2017 and not 2018/19. (Of course my formula is imprecise, but the idea was to know approximately the order of magnitude of the security we had with fees alone.)

Of course if hashrate dropped now to 50 EH/s, 95% of all miners went bankrupt and sold their equipment potentially to attackers, then the network would be seriously in danger. I don't dispute that. But we're here talking about a scenario for 2140. The process thus will be very gradual. Even if the equation for miners becomes already problematic in 10 years like MeGold666 feared, this would also not cause the hashrate to drop instantly to dangerous levels. We would probably have 10-20 years more where one after another miner would go bankrupt, and the end result would be a hashrate with a significantly cheaper attack cost. But probably the hashrate would still increase or stagnate, only that due to Moore's law and used equipment the attack cost would sink.


I actually agree here at least partly. The attacker's incentive could be higher if he can short enough coins to be able to profit from the resulting crash, so the market cap can have a small influence on incentives if we assume that "higher market cap" means "more value available for short selling on BTC lending markets", although the correlation is of course not direct. For double spends, as I wrote in the last post, the incentive should be linked to the transaction volume in a stable currency, i.e. how much he's able to steal with this double spend if he's able to rollback a block of transactions.

But in general what is most important in my opinion is the pure attack cost, i.e. the cost to acquire the hardware or hashrate to perform the attack.

If Bitcoin had a sidechain with Monero-style ring signatures (and other privacy features) and small transaction fees, would this make it digital cash for you too? ;)

I agree with this I think tail emissions plus fees are the best option long term. Transactions fees would need to be much higher to sustain current levels of mining hashrate which would scare people away from using the network. But also I fear the variability of transaction fees would destabilize the network. Tadge Dryja makes some good points about this in this MIT lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXWbdiOBW5w at 58 minutes in. During large fee periods miners could end up fighting to reorg high fee blocks instead of mining new blocks.


One possibility is if mining fees are low enough to be vulnerable to attack large bitcoin holders could have mining power on stand by to turn on in case of an attack but that might just be wishful thinking. If I was Michael Saylor id probably have some rigs on stand by.

Sidechain would not be Bitcoin and why use something that convulsed when you can just use Monero on layer 1 ?
Seeing how Lightning Network is used, we can see people prefer simplicity:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1e1b1r4/monero_crushes_bitcoin_on_shopinbit/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1e1b1r4/monero_crushes_bitcoin_on_shopinbit/)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1dxa26v/monero_beats_bitcoin_on_coincardscom/ (https://www.reddit.com/r/Monero/comments/1dxa26v/monero_beats_bitcoin_on_coincardscom/)

We can theorize here but this market numbers speak for themself  ;)

I don't even see Bitcoin as a store of value as it's a speculation vehicle without any other use case with very high volatility but even if it didn't had this problems, I wouldn't put substantial amount of money into a transparent blockchain.
Criminals can target you more easily and the government will know how much you have and can easily force you to pay tax from it before even converting to FIAT.
Monero is a Swiss account of 21th century  8)

If Bitcoin and Monero were physical banks, which would you choose ? the one that show your billings to the whole world and is slower and more expensive to use or the one that is faster, cheaper and private ?
Which one people will choose ? I think you know the answer  ;D

Bitcoin is still a thing only in the mind of bag holders, it has nothing to offer compared to Monero.
But hey, that's just me and people who actually use cryptocurrencies in daily life.

If you're into "number goes up" then Monero has much bigger growth potential by being still so low in market cap.
In order for Bitcoin to hit 1 million USD evaluation it would need to do 15x and I don't think it will ever happen.
15x in Monero is very possible and it would still be pretty low in market cap with price evaluation at only ~2.4k USD and it will be much less volatile because it's actually used in real world and not only as a speculation vehicle.

I'm not trying to convince you on anything, I just wrote what I think and I'm not changing my mind on it  ;D ;D ;D

It would not be "convulsed". It would be as easy as using wBTC tokens on Ethereum, and can be made as easy as simple Bitcoin transactions, because in the ideal case if you don't need the mainchain you can onboard on the sidechain and stay there. User experience would be much simpler than Lightning's current one.

In addition you could ask the contrary: why does the whole world (full nodes) needs to validate and store every $5 VPS payment? (to not always use the "coffee" analogy ;))

If Monero was used as much as Bitcoin is now, then eventually it would run into the same dilemma: node centralization (with lower censorshop resistance) or high fees. It has a dynamic block size, so it roughly follows the BCH/BSV model (with a few more restrictions if I remember correctly). This means that in the case of an usage boost XMR's node count could lower considerably if the CPU/RAM costs for nodes to validate transactions explode.

I like and also use Monero, but I also like to have choices, why should I adhere to a monoculture? Not every transaction needs to be as private as a XMR transaction. And Bitcoin has several advantages: simple transactions are smaller, and the Script language allows L2s like Lightning and sidechains and some other use cases, which afaik are not possible in this way on Monero.

That Lightning is stagnating currently is true, it could be related to the attacks discovered last year, but as a "prepaid-card"-like tool for small payments it works quite good as these attacks would never be profitable to steal low amounts, and usability can always be improved.

People are not using wBTC or LN to buy stuff, they use Monero - I have posted you the proof  ;D

Did not read rest of your post, it's long and I have already proved my point   8)

C'mon, don't leave such a bad impression for Monero shills. :P
Of course, those reading this discussion will draw their own conclusions. I think nobody here disputes that Monero is used somewhat for payments, and that's obviously a good thing. But this obsession to delegitimize Bitcoin? I don't understand that.
The problem is that the issue you "didn't read", the scaling dilemma, including the relations between block size, fees, block rewards, censorship resistance and node decentralization, is exactly the crucial point cryptocurrencies will have to solve eventually. And if Monero has no real plan for it then it has an adoption ceiling which probably is significantly lower than Bitcoin's. I hope most Monero folks are not that short-sighted.

Your worries about scalability issues have been already answered by someone else in this thread   ;)

tl;dr: Monero has no scalability limits on the protocol level, it is limited by the infrastructure which is constantly evolving and recently Monero community has been doing stress-tests from which we can see it has no problem running the same and even more transactions daily than Bitcoin but faster and for lower fees.

long story short, Bitcoin is handicapped on protocol level and trying to put all the weight on L2's with endless promises while we have Monero which delivers what Bitcoin only promises  ;D ;D ;D

Have they tested the cost to running a 51% attack on monero? From my understanding it should be pretty easy given the large number of server clusters in the world. One of the biggest hurdles to attack bitcoins network is the cost of hardware. Also a lot of governments don't like monero. Who's to say one day a wealthy enough government somewhere doesn't pay for a server cluster to attack monero for a few days to destroy its credibility?

Due to current mining difficulty it would be logistically close to impossible to create such mining facility by single entity even by the government to 51% attack and due to privacy features of Monero the attack would not make so much damage as it could in Bitcoin.
If someone wanted to 51% attack Monero, they would do it years ago when it was actually somewhat feasible.

Governments don't like Monero ? It's just another reason to love Monero.
I personally wouldn't touch anything endorsed or even liked by the Government, hopefully Monero will never be liked by the government  8)

Monero has much better decentralization when it comes to mining contrary to Bitcoin which is mainly secured by big companies that need to obey the law and usually reside in one single physical place.

If government wanted to control Bitcoin and let's say impose a black listing of certain addresses then they would go after this mining companies and they would have to obey.
Due to this mining centralization in Bitcoin government can easily shut it down like we have seen in China mining ban when 75% of hashrate gone in short time.

If you are concerned about scalability issues and 51% attacks, you shouldn't be using Bitcoin because in this subject it is very bad  ;D ;D ;D

Many people are concerned about the government executing a 51% attack on Monero. I think a more urgent problem is bloating the chain with spam, as it'd greatly hurt scalability. It'd be much more efficient and inexpensive to attack Monero like that, even though I haven't researched on the exact numbers.

Bitcoin is already being bloated by bug exploitation which ordinals use and developers are still discussing if they should fix it  :D

Seriously, why are you guys so into Bitcoin when it's clearly inferior to the Monero in every possible way ?
Is it some kind of nostalgia thing ? or do you still believe it will hit 1 million USD evaluation ?

 ;D ;D ;D

There is nothing to be fixed. Spam can only be discouraged at a transaction fee level. Remember that Monero has a dynamical block size limit, and there are no UTXO. Every time you create an output, it is indexed forever.

You should remember too that Bitcoin has no privacy and people make thousands of fake transactions (mixing) just to stay semi-private  ;D ;D ;D
How's that for a bloating ?  :D

Truth be told, Big Tech cloud services (AWS, Azure etc.) have so much CPU horsepower that it is indeed possible to execute a 51% attack against Monero.

That thing is no longer possible in Bitcoin (as it was back in 2010-2011) due to ASICs (more security, at the expense of reducing decentralization a bit).

BTC vs XMR tokenomics are totally different and if you ask me, I believe the human population will experience huge deflation in the coming decades, so a tail emission is counterproductive (unless you really believe the human population will keep increasing).

It's fine to have both cryptocurrencies in the market, just like it's fine to have both Linux and OpenBSD (security-hardened UNIX by default). No need to fight over it. :)

I agree with most of your post, but tail emission could be countered by the "lost coins" if it's sufficiently low, and thus I don't really think it would incide really in tokenomics, even with a reducing population or a stagnating or even gradually shrinking economy.

The beauty of a "sidechain-driven" tail emission (by merge-mining and miners getting rewarded by sidechain utility tokens) is however that the emission schedule would be much more flexible than a hard-coded tail emission. For example, if the sidechain token inflation resulted to be too high to maintain the sidechain utility tokens' value, sidechains have much lower hurdles to hardfork into a lower emission schedule than the main chain, and of course vice versa too.

This isn't that relevant for the Monero <-> Bitcoin discussion (which is pointless and borderline OT) as Monero has already had a history of hardforks and thus could hardfork again and again to lower their supply, but for Bitcoin even a single hardfork could be very difficult. Thus, the "sidechain-driven" tail emission model would be the concept least intrusive to BTC's "core value proposition", which includes its "deflationary" nature. The sidechain utility tokens' supply would not affect Bitcoin's emission schedule and its deflationary nature at all.

We can only speculate because exact numbers are not publicly known, what we know is that current Monero hashrate is so big that making such an attack is in the fairy-tale zone.
Bitcoin miners being obligated to government rules (OFAC) is much more likely than 51% attack on Monero.
With the upcoming Bitcoin halvings the hashrate centralization will be even higher than today.


Yes, Monero has a history of UPDATES and is actively developed because cryptography evolves, infrastructure evolves, everything evolves (except Bitcoin)  ;D ;D ;D
Bitcoin is still in the early 2000's when computers still had optical disk drive installed and used phone line for the Internet and everyone was still running their system on slow HDD :D
Ahh this were the times! Windows 7 was released, Facebook overtaken MySpace and PS3 Slim was released, first version of Android was introduced, beta version of Chrome browser was released and first iPhone was released  :D

Bitcoin belongs in the past along with the other outdated (but milestone) technologies ;)
Monero will be always updated to stay relevant to the times.

Bitcoin is HTTP, Monero is HTTPS. All sites today are now running on HTTPS because privacy matters even if you as a user don't care.
Does it have overhead over plain HTTP ? yes, but we don't care because infrastructure evolves and we even use VPN on top of that with even more overhead.

The only people defending this outdated protocol for transactions called Bitcoin are the bag holders, people who don't use it as a cryptocurrency but just hold for dear life in hope they can someday exchange it to more FIAT.  ;D ;D ;D

I love when Bitcoin bag holders say things like "there is only 21m bitcoins and there are ~8 billion people on earth! so we all become millionaires if you just hold 1 BTC long enough!"  while conveniently forgetting that cryptocurrency market share of Bitcoin has been dropping for a decade now and is now below 50% ;)

I'm waiting to abolish more BS from Bitcoiners, there's really not even one reason why people should care about Bitcoin when there is Monero that's better in every way.
If you forget about the project name and focus on the tech you will see it, Project X vs Project Y, one is faster, cheaper and private - the other one is not - what's here to discuss ?  :D

https://x.com/shopinbit/status/1811651225005195471 (https://x.com/shopinbit/status/1811651225005195471)
https://x.com/CoinCards/status/1809702144288882870 (https://x.com/CoinCards/status/1809702144288882870)

Is there even a point of discussing it when people are already switching to newer tech ?

I would say such attack isn't profitable, rather than fairy-tale zone. And FWIW, Top 500 list exists.


I think you mean some mining pool located in US, https://b10c.me/observations/08-missing-sanctioned-transactions/ (https://b10c.me/observations/08-missing-sanctioned-transactions/). And i think they'd rather shutdown and sell their BTC rather than helping crashing Bitcoin price.

Shutting down would do more damage to the network security (and in turn to the price) than obeying the government rules.
This big mining companies care only about FIAT profits and they will keep operating with OFAC rules rather than shut the whole operation down.


Last time I have made calculations on #1 fastest supercomputer in the world it was not enough to do 51% attack.
And all they could do is double spend, censoring transactions would not work because the amounts,  sender and receiver are encrypted.

On Bitcoin it's much more devastating and we have to believe that two or three of this companies don't collude together because that's all it takes to 51% attack in this centralized network.
How much hashrate does Bitmain alone have ? They have always advantage over other miners because they sell used hardware only when their new tech is ready for them to mine on.

Bitcoin - Secured by Chinese greed  ;D

The problem with Bitcoin is that it's not secure against government overreach because this centralized mining companies can (and will) be forced to obey the law which will include obeying OFAC black list and who knows what.

Bitcoin is outdated transaction processor, nothing more.

I expect performing 51% attack would have more and quicker impact on Bitcoin price, rather than reduced hashrate though.


What if multiple company or government who own those supercomputer wouldn't collude together.


They theoretically could prevent all transaction from getting confirmed, by only mining empty block.


I would question about the centralized part, but otherwise it's true. But don't forget they're risking their long-term reputation, long-term profit and potential law-suit.

Law suit ? from who ? I thought Bitcoin is decentralized and no one stands behind it ? Joke - we all know who are the owners:

https://youtu.be/eafzIW52Rgc?t=1049 (https://youtu.be/eafzIW52Rgc?t=1049)

Today Bitcoin do more harm than good to the cryptocurrency world with it's outdated protocol like with the Steam platform who ditched it because the transactions were too slow and too expensive.
Or with the failed el salvador:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asmOZh-E8W0 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asmOZh-E8W0)

People have spoken and they don't like high cost of transactions or the LN which is a disaster on every step (usage is ~>1% LOL).

Bitcoin with it's devastating impact on environment and unusable protocol should step aside and make way to new protocols that actually solve problems and work today.
With Bitcoin we only hear endless promises of L2's solving everything, the biggest promise LN has failed and Bitcoin is beyond repair.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBTuonnuURA (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gBTuonnuURA)

Bitcoin... What a useless disaster it has become.

Some example,
1. Anyone (such as exchange) who become victim of their double-spend attack.
2. If the attack performed by company who own mining pool, miner theoretically can sue them for misuse of their hashrate.

This are good examples but we all know how law suits stand against Chinese owned companies, they will not care.

I think we can agree that 51% attack (on any of the network) would be only possible if hashrate drastically dropped due to some reasons like profitability collapse and then it would make financial sense to attack it by smaller attackers (if the price wouldn't collapse as well but it most probably would).

Bitcoin today is just slowing down the revolution it started, it's showing cryptocurrencies from the worst side due to it's outdated protocol.

I don't understand why people complain about transaction fees being too high. Its a decentralized network that using a couple basis points of the global energy supply. Of course its going to be expensive. You have to pay a price to secure a decentralized network weather its inflation or transaction fees. If a coin has low fees its a strong indicator of low security or centralization or a indicator of rapid inflation.

How long have you been in the cave ? the year is 2024 and Monero proved that you don't need high fees to secure the network while being more decentralized than Bitcoin  :D :D :D

Monero is much less secure. Given the best CPU on the market you can get around 0.5KH/J. The total hashrate of monero is 2.32GH. So an attacker would need 4.0x10^11J of energy per day. With a cost of energy of $0.05 per KWH that comes out to $25k per day to 51% attack monero. This is a rough estimate but look at https://bitinfocharts.com/monero/ (https://bitinfocharts.com/monero/) you'll see total miner reward is around $70K so not far off.

Since its pretty easy for anyone to rent CPU power given the large number of data centers in the world the only cost would be power plus a premium to the data center so at worst case scenario monero would only cost 50k/per day to shut down. This is easily done by wealth individuals or a small countries. And given how much centralized powers hate monero I wouldn't be surprised if the US or EU did this to stop terrorist organization or what ever they dem an enemy.

Since you don't have much knowledge this calculations may seem logical to you but it's not that cheap to attack Monero and it's impossible to rent that kind of hashing power (AWS and other services don't even allow mining) and nicehash which is the biggest provider wouldn't even scratch the surface of Monero.

I recommend reading more before spitting another numerical nonsense  :D :D :D

Energy wise I agree Bitcoin is more secure, but Monero is more decentralized and security comes mainly from decentralization.
51% attack is only one threat, another is government bans or enforcement of rules and Bitcoin is much more prone to this types of attacks.

Bitcoin is on it's knees when it comes to regulators while Monero shows middle finger because it's untouchable.  ;)

It's because attackers who want to do fud against Bitcoin and Bitcoin mining. They as attackers, need to have something shock to attract people for reading and mislead unknowledgeable, inexperienced people to believe that the information is true.

The truth is opposite, if people can do research and learn about it.
End the fud on energy consumption (https://endthefud.org/energy)
Defend Bitcoin Proof of Work (https://bitcoincleanup.com/) mining that already uses clean energy.
Bitcoin Mining Council H1 2023 Briefing (https://www.youtube.com/live/dHEgnYBCX00?feature=share) with information on very small percent of Bitcoin mining energy consumption compares to other industries and is it more environmental sustainable.

Bitcoin mining is only 0.13% of global CO₂ production.
Bitcoin mining energy use is 0.2% of the world's total energy.
Its sustainable power mix % is 59.9% (global mining) and 63.1% (BMC mining).

If you compare transaction sizes in bytes, then you will notice, that Monero is much more bloated:

https://www.truthcoin.info/images/deniab-worst-case.png

Full article: https://www.truthcoin.info/blog/deniability/

By the way, you can try a simple experiment: take Bitcoin blockchain, and convert Bitcoin transactions into equivalent in Monero. You will be surprised, what will be the total size of the blockchain, instead of 600 GB we currently have. Instead of simple transactions, taking 250 bytes, you will have those 1800 bytes per transaction, so I guess you will have at least 7x more bytes, so something around at least 4 TB.

You mentioned OFAC on previous posts, which means you should already know some of those company ocated in US (rather than China).


FYI many service don't care whether you perform mining or other task which use 100% CPU, as long as you rent dedicated server. Only few provider (such as Hetzner) which explicitly forbid any cryptocurrency application on their server. And looking at https://www.nicehash.com/my/marketplace/RANDOMXMONERO (https://www.nicehash.com/my/marketplace/RANDOMXMONERO), it's true it's far from enough to perform 51% attack.

You made me laugh  :D why ? people are using mixers to semi-anonymize Bitcoin transactions which takes a lot more bytes than one Monero transaction  ;)
You can multiply Bitcoin tx size by 10-15 and this "anonymizing" services use a lot more hops and people who use this services tend to use it multiple times so in real world scenario, Monero tx is smaller in the end (by a lot!).

This is for regular users, but you may remember plenty of articles where Bitcoins were stolen or came from illegal source and due to lack of fungibility in Bitcoin this criminals used thousands of hops to confuse authorities  ;)
So you know, Bitcoiners talking about bloating in Monero is a comedy of it's own  :D Do people who spread this disinformation lack knowledge or do they do it on purpose to make Bitcoin look good ?
Or maybe they come from "in a perfect world no one would need to use mixers" but forget real world will never be perfect and that's why we need Monero.
Example:
Source: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-arrest-two-and-seize-3-6-billion-in-bitcoin-stolen-in-2016-hack-of-bitfinex-exchange-11644339957 (https://www.marketwatch.com/story/feds-arrest-two-and-seize-3-6-billion-in-bitcoin-stolen-in-2016-hack-of-bitfinex-exchange-11644339957)
All this bloat and they were still traced because Bitcoin is not fungible.

It takes a whole new network (Lightning Network) for Bitcoin to be somewhat usable, how's that for a bloating ?  :D If only LN would work.... but no, it's just a waste of space and time. (before you say anything: 1% usage  ;D)

Most of the transactions on Bitcoin network are bot-trading back and forth to earn on the smallest price swings, they do not use mixers but people who actually want to use Bitcoin use mixers a lot.

Bitcoin is one big bloat to the whole ecosystem, it would be better if it stayed in the past because today it's just making a clown of itself.
Using Bitcoin today is like trying to use 3½-inch floppy disk drives with it's 1.44 MB of capacity to transfer Bluray movie from one computer to another  ;D ;D ;D

Let me quote my self:


People have already chosen better solution than Bitcoin and it's retarded brother Lightning Network  ;)


Tell this to people in Texas who lost hearing and have other health issues due to noise (no smiley faces this time, it's not funny)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXCga3toxok (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lXCga3toxok)

I know you will keep defending Bitcoin but deep in your heart you know it's a waste of time.
You will endlessly defend it with false/outdated information but the real world usage statistics speak for themself, I'll leave it at that.
Peace  ;)

/WEF has entered the chat...

You don't even need to perform a 51% attack on Monero. Since it's a black box, anything goes. If you cannot audit the blockchain, then you have a problem, since you cannot guarantee that nobody is exploiting an unfixed bug, such as, inflating the supply, double spending, or anything in between. This is the double edged sword of anonymity and fungibility.

You are either:

• Uneducated on how Monero works
• Intentionally spitting lies about Monero

Just because it's not transparent (by default) doesn't mean you can't audit it - It's cryptography allows to check supply without sacrificing privacy.
I know, It's hard to understand for uneducated people.  ;D ;D ;D

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMbnJzHhoBI (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMbnJzHhoBI)

https://www.getmonero.org/resources/moneropedia/ringCT.html
1. How you can prove, that nobody knows "H(G)"?
2. If someone will know "H(G)", it will result in undetectable inflation, because that person can just then create "-1 coin", and then add one coin into any output.
3. Only coinbase transactions can be audited, because everything else contains unauditable "H(G)".
4. There are other models outside Monero, where instead of "H(G)", you have just N-of-N multisig public key, and then it is safer, because then, in the worst case, only those N people are affected by overprinted coins, and everything can be easily fixed, without messing up with other UTXOs.

You are repeating yourself and I have already answered you this - you are misinterpreting everything.
And no, not only coinbase transactions can be audited <facepalm>.

Seriously, I'm not here to teach you and waste my time. Read about it more and then discuss because you are just proving you know nothing about Monero and how it works.

From Monero developers: https://www.getmonero.org/2020/01/17/auditability.html

Hopefully, they do know how it works.

That's what I'm trying to say, the auditability is correct if the math is correct and it is correct.
No bug was found and there were plenty of audits.

Is there a bug ? could be, so there can be in Bitcoin and both would be equally doomed if it was exploited today even for a short while so it doesn't really matter if it happens.
There could be a bug in seed generation and some hacker could drain all the funds in Bitcoin and Monero.
Is that stopping you from trusting it ?

The issue about hidden inflation is greatly described by Fluffypony:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDkx6gRPMg (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=meDkx6gRPMg)

Please watch it before continuing discussion.

1. In Bitcoin, you have secp256k1 (https://neuromancer.sk/std/secg/secp256k1), and in Monero, you have Curve25519 (https://neuromancer.sk/std/other/Curve25519). They are fundamentally different, because the former has h=1, and the latter has h=8 (and using h>1 already caused some problems in the past).
2. If you would have ringCT in Bitcoin, it would be optional, and behind N-of-N Taproot multisig. Which means, that only those multisigs would be affected, everyone else could avoid overprinted coins. It is the same story, as with millisatoshis: if you find a bug there, then only LN users will be affected (and after closing their channels, the problem will be solved).

Note that Monero will suffer more from that kind of bug, because if you know the private key to "H(G)", then you can print new coins, and remain undetected. In case of Bitcoin, you can only move existing ones, and that will alert the true owner of those coins (and everyone else, because it will be publicly visible, that for example Satoshi's coins were moved).

Also, we already had that kind of bugs. In Bitcoin, those funds just moved, for example from brainwallets. https://mempool.space/address/1C7zdTfnkzmr13HfA2vNm5SJYRK6nEKyq8 (this is "correct horse battery staple", it received and spent 21.88971469 BTC at the time of writing, and there are much more unsafe keys like that).

Sure, here we go:

We can validate hashing, and I did it some time ago: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5402178

Also, when it comes to key derivation, then many people tried to reinvent the wheel, for example: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5321992

Of course, that kind of key derivation is unsafe, but it can clearly show you, what is the difference between hardened and non-hardened keys (in case of non-hardened ones, you use SHA-256(pubkey||nonce), while for hardened ones, you simply have SHA-256(privkey||nonce), and you can easily see, why we use different KDFs in practice).

If x-value of your public key is a hash of something, then it may be possible to create a valid signature, without solving "the discrete logarithm problem". There are transactions, and signatures out there, where nobody knows the private key, but they are valid, because of some bugs. Some examples: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5373858

https://mempool.space/testnet/address/032baf163f5e27261ab3228e61fb86dc98054abd514751fce93d7444e8fbc6a293

Literally nobody knows the private key to 032baf163f5e27261ab3228e61fb86dc98054abd514751fce93d7444e8fbc6a293. And it was moved, it is valid, it just exploited SIGHASH_SINGLE bug. And all of that without solving ECDLP, and burning the world.

Again, literally nobody knows the private key to 1psPJZYEJrjPtY6kw5Tqtj4mW2yXSSDuH, and the signature is valid, and can be verified. Because of exploiting public key recovery. Again, ECDLP solution not needed.

So, how can you guarantee, that there is no bug in Monero, which could be exploited in that way? In case of 032baf163f5e27261ab3228e61fb86dc98054abd514751fce93d7444e8fbc6a293, if you could do the same thing with H(G), then guess what: you would have an unlimited money printing machine! And in case of Bitcoin, only that single address is affected, not the whole system, with all UTXOs flying around.

Edit: Wrong. We have coinbase maturity for those cases. If you double-spend your funds in your coinbase transaction, then you need 100 confirmations, to move that further into any exchange, to sell those funds, and to affect any other coins. Which means 100 blocks * 10 minutes/block = 1000 minutes to resolve the problem. Even in case of Value Overflow Incident, the whole fix was after around 70 blocks, so no other coins were involved, except immature coinbase transactions.

So, those sentences may be true, if you wait 15-20 hours, and it will remain undetected for longer than that.

Facts are:

• There are currently no known critical bugs in either of the projects.
• Both projects would crash & burn if this kind of bug was exploited.
• Bitcoin (nor Monero) is not immune to this (or any other) bug and fixing the bug then updating (hard forking) would take too long anyway.

So it's a weak argument against Monero and we can point fingers all day long at possible bug scenarios.
If Monero had a bug in it's privacy protocol and exploiter would be able to reveal amounts I would consider Monero worthless.
For this reason Bitcoin is worthless for me because it already reveals amounts.

There's nothing else I have to say here.

No hard feelings, I understand your love for Bitcoin and see you as a cryptocurrency brother ;)

Financial activities will drive Bitcoin to continuously advance toward the technological limits of cryptocurrencies. From a financial perspective, cryptocurrencies are destined to replace paper money as the mainstream currency due to their increasingly prominent functionalities.

Taking BTC and ETH as examples, the current Ordinals protocol has expanded Bitcoin's service capabilities with inscriptions and collectible ordinal numbers, as well as names containing words. There is immense future potential for speculation in this space.

As a result, the possibility of expanding storage fees for various sats we collect is a financial consideration worth discussing.

On the other hand, ETH's development is less concerning in terms of trading volume. ETH's functionality leans more towards replacing ballots, with potential use in various elections, including U.S. elections. This means ETH will not lack trading volume to generate transaction fees, which helps balance the relationship between ETH supply and miners.

Ordinals are cancer to Bitcoin  ;)
ETH for elections ? with it's contract exploitable history ? I don't think so.

Not everything needs blockchain, elections could be safely done using centralized server and proper encryption.

I watched it, and does raise some good arguments. However, the response is given above by vjudeu and by gmaxwell in here (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1085273.msg64392563#msg64392563).

How can you implement ringCT with Taproot? It sounds very interesting.

Actually, elections should probably never be done electronically, and here's why: https://invidious.privacyredirect.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs.

Very good points in this video, especially about malwares.

Malware infested machines of the voters seems to be a problem that can't be solved and infected machine can display other info than what's being sent as mentioned in the video...

Even best cryptography or blockchain approach will not help here.

In the same way malware infested wallet software could drain funds from your cold-wallet machine, it would display different information than what's being done.
Even checking checksums of the wallet software would not work because the malware could fake it too.

WYSINotWYG  :D

Sir,

From a technical perspective, I agree with your view. However, please keep in mind that technology is meant to serve certain goals, such as finance. ETH, as a voting mechanism, is a more reasonable and efficient way to distribute wealth from a financial standpoint. The power of democracy should influence all layers of society, and I hope technology can better achieve this goal. While fairness and security in voting are crucial, elections and voting should fulfill more societal functions.

The development of cryptocurrencies ultimately hinges on their functionality. Their ability to replace traditional currencies relies on their capacity to offer more functions. We should be more bold in proposing their potential applications.

I'm not saying that Monero has an inflation bug of some sort, but takuma sato made a good point. Trusting that Monero doesn't have an inflation bug is trusting its cryptography instead of merely verifying it simply by checking the blockchain. You may call people uneducated as many times as you like, but there's a non-zero probability that ALL cryptocurrencies have serious bugs/exploits.

During the recent craze for quantum computing (again) where the cyclical FUD about exploiting public keys to bruteforce their hashes and then moving the coins hit again, it occurred to me how Monero may dump to 0 the moment this happened. With Bitcoin we would at least have an open blockchain were we would be able to see what's going on, with Monero it's just a black box, there would be no way to know what's going on and who knows what other exploits could be going on. This will always be the problem with these anonymous coins. Anonimity is better reached by mixing txos than having a blackbox where anything goes.

As far as I know the Monero blockchain would not be a black box anymore from the moment on someone publishes at least parts of the data and calculations needed to break its cryptography. This would actually be quite bad from a privacy perspective, as Shor's algorithm would practically enable those using it to de-anonymize all Monero operations, at least according to this article (https://medium.com/coinmonks/quantum-shield-of-solace-monero-in-the-post-quantum-era-713f759ae012). However, once this data is published (probably this will happen gradually), more and more blocks will become "auditable" in a more standard way, becoming "as open as Bitcoin".

Of course if only one entity (or a few bad actors) have access to a QC capable on running Shor's algorithm on Monero data you may be correct and this could lead to confusion, but I believe this timeframe won't last for long.

In conclusion, if quantum computing really becomes a problem, Monero will be probably even more pressured to change to post-quantum cryptography as Bitcoin. However, the "if" still is a big one. We don't know when it will happen and it can be still decades away or not happen at all. So I don't know if this really can be an anti-Monero argument. If it happens, both BTC and XMR will have to change.

I'm still quite neutral rearding the BTC vs. XMR question; regarding the tail emission vs halvings question I may see a slight edge for XMR but not relevant enough to endanger BTC's future, as there are many possibilities to provide miner income as discussed in the earlier posts in this thread (I still mainly would advocate for sidechain-driven tail emissions :) ).