Bitcoin Forum

I've been thinking about the future of bitcoin in the decades to come. Like many of you I think that bitcoin will become the world's reserve currency, if it weren't for one little problem: miner reward. I know this problem has been discussed in the past, but I have not seen much discussion in the present. There is a great paper on the topic https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CCS.pdf, which shows how unstable the ecosystem becomes once block rewards are taken out of the equation. Fees will not replace rewards in the sense that incentives change. How do you think it will affect future development, and when do you think this will have the first concrete manifestations both in network dynamics and price?
Do you think it will fork in other versions where there is always a tail reward like in other cryptocurrencies? If that were to happen it would destroys bitcoin's case as having a finite supply.
These issues are far ahead and I'll probably be dead before they will actually become tangible issues, but I think it's important to discuss anyways.
I'd love to hear opinions from someone who's more knowledgeable than me, so thank you in advance for any reply.

Bitcoin is a deflationary currerency, which means the marketcap and price will be increasing. Although, the price over a short time can decrease, but Bitcoin nature is inevitable which will make the price to have a net increase over long time period. This alone will make the price to be increasing in a way the price as at then when all bitcoin are already mined to be increasing because of limited supply. Because of the price increase, transaction fee should be enough to make miners to continue mining bitcoin.

Anything that will result to finite supply of bitcoin to be altered can not occur, it can only lead to hard fork while bitcoin will remain Bitcoin with a total supply of 21 million. And I think bitcoin miners (community) will not agree with such because increasing the total supply of bitcoin will only lead to price devaluation and depreciation when there is no need, it has postitive effect for bitcoin price to appreciate.

As is proved in the paper, an environment where fees are the only source of revenue for miners makes selfish behavior not align with the correct functioning of the network, unlike what happens in the present.
Yes, I meant a hard fork which could happen if enough miners want solve the detrimental problems that I've been talking about.

The paper mistaken, because it analyses an abstraction which is too different from the real system. In particular it disregards that blocksize is limited, which is a factor known to address this instability since at least 2011. (There are other countermeasures as well, such as locktime based anti-fee sniping)

https://medium.com/@bergealex4/bitcoin-is-unstable-without-the-block-size-size-limit-70db07070a54

Absolutely not.

When it comes to hard forks what miners want is completely and utterly irrelevant. The consensus rules the users use are what decide who is or who isn't a miner.  If someone violates the rules individually and autonomously by the users then they just aren't a miner anymore, they might as well be sending viagra spam instead of blocks for all the users nodes would care about them.

I wouldn't be so quick to assume that. The subsidy decline is geometric and will become small long before its zero.  About 10% of miner income comes from fees today.  And an income stabilizing backlog is no longer a theory but a practical reality.

I honestly couldn't understand what different it makes on the matter whether block size is limited or not. Regarding the countermeasure, a miner could just use a modified code for the node to get rid of it. It's a countermeasure only on the surface.

What I ultimately meant is that if the fork is for the good of bitcoin in the long run, it will inevitably be used. I'm talking about forks with the purpose of saving bitcoin (if it were to become necessary), not forks based on different views like bch.

Yeah I guess it's going to be gradual rather than sudden.

Because when you have mined a full block and there is a backlog, the difference in income between mining the next block (all full of pending transactions) and going backwards and remining the prior block to take its fees is small (and comes at a cost of decreased chance of eventually being in the longest chain).  This is particularly true because new transactions that are arriving cannot be included in the prior block if it is remined.

No, if a miner violates anti-fee-sniping their block is invalid and will be painlessly ignored by the network.

Ok yeah this might mitigate the problem.
Remember that in that environment the selfish behavior would be for every miner to modify its code to take advantage of this strategy. One would have to hope that most miners wouldn't do that for the good of the network overall but that's not selfish behavior.

Regardless of the Principles of Bitcoin such a hard fork could happen. It's just that it most likely won't be accepted by the market since no one would want to buy such a coin over BTC.



If it's enforced on the protocol level, there's no way around it other than forking of into an alt coin.

I wasn't referring to the block size but to the countermeasure mentioned in the medium article, that is

Miners can't violate that, it's physically impossible.  If they break the locktime rule their blocks are no longer blocks and get ignored. Even if 100% of previously active miners do so, that just means is that they stopped mining.  It's no different from a technical perspective than if they all decided to award themselves an additional 100 BTC per block.

The anti-snipe protection isn't especially powerful, but it's just another tool in the set... it amplifies the incentive protections that exist from the risk of orphaning vs the small marginal gain that exists in the presence of backlog.

21 million coins won't be the final limit. Majority will eventually agree to keep btc block rewards at a sustainable level.

No; we'll just see 2 camps of people. The supply-cappers and the tail-emitters.
Both agree that mining rewards should always be very significant, in order to achieve long term security and stability.
These two conflicting visions also see different outcomes of inevitable coin loss,
which I believe is very unlikely to drop below 0.1% and may be closer to 1% on a yearly basis.

Capped Supply

A supply cap requires a block reward dwindling to insignificance (long before it reaches 0).
So the significant mining reward must come from large fees. Mining stability requires a steady backlog of fee paying transactions, which in turn requires a highly constrained block size. Coin loss will erode the circulating supply over time
and will eventually necessitate subdividing the smallest unit.

Tail Emission

With an eventual (or even from launch) constant block reward, fees are only needed to deter spam, and block size is less constrained. It could be more dynamic to deal with surges in transaction demand, or slowly grow over time. Coin loss will put a softcap on circulating supply.

People who stop believing in the 21M bitcoin cap could of course try to fork away, but such a fork would very much go against Bitcoin's main principle of immutability. and would likely fare no better than altcoins that embraced the tail emission from the start, which is probably what those people would instead gravitate to.

Bitcoin cash is interesting for being in the Capped Supply camp, while being unwilling to highly constrain the block size. Which looks like a recipe for long term insecurity and/or instability.

  i think Satoshi made a time-adjusted self destruction design here.İntentionally He put a limit to cap supply becuz he knew the mentality of money flows in this 0-negative rates area,printed trillio dollars,euros.. A small part of this money will be located a scarce supplied financial instrument, higher demand than supply..So it will gain popularity and adoption with this rapid Price increase until no one can denies the existence.A 600 billion mcap monster.

 Admit it,none of us,mostly wont be get involved in the idea or tech if Bitcoin didnt accelerate price with limited cap. Miner and asic firms wont invest if it was stayed low priced.We are all price and profit oriented,we want to beat inflation and censorship. Yet,VC,Miners,Asic firms,and you..already discussing,thinking. 21 million +%3 inflation or %5 inflation ,blocksize etc.


  Miners and everybody needs rewards. 1.5 million left coins. it is time detonated. Satoshi knew it and trapped the whole financial system.Bitcoin is an only spearhead.

  Real hard money is Gold. Still living at the every dark corner of the world.

  An unlimited supply,miner rewards for thousand centuries. Still inflated but less.İmmense liquidity.Perfect design tested for 1000 years.İmmortal.

  Bitcoin is monetary policy  immutable,which makes it Bitcoin. There is nothing you can do. When you change it, you are like ecb,fed,boj.And if stays 21 million this way again it dies slowly.



  
 

I think it's undisputed that its scarcity is part of Bitcoin's success. Personally I feel that trailing emission is definitely worth discussing as an alternative monetary policy (in the context of alts). But without Bitcoin gaining traction due to its limited supply, causing a Cambrian explosion of alts, we'd never reach the point where we could discuss this issue in a practical sense in the first place.

Actually I'd even go as far as to say that the abrupt supply shocks caused by the halvings are part of the plan. An asset affected by sudden surges is more likely to gain attention than one that's constantly growing. And the four years between halvings seem to be just enough time that people can recuperate after a crash without Bitcoin being completely lost out of public view, making it the perfect FOMO trigger.

The block reward concerns all feel high up in the air for most people. That is, until the we reach a specific period where the rewards are so abysmally low compared to the value being moved on chain, that transaction finality actually becomes a material concern - this will be unfamiliar and frightening for many, undoubtedly causing disunity.

I sincerely believe we can anticipate a chain-split revolving around this issue come early/mid 2030's; One side would stick to the supply cap and the other side would eliminate all remaining halvings, in effect creating a tail emission of 0.78 or 0.39 per block. It is practically going to be a battle of whether intermediary tools should provide transaction finality, or the chain it self.

What do you mean by "sustainable"? How do you determine what is sustainable, and how do you know that fees won't provide it?


Why would there be a split? I don't think there is enough information to justify either side at this point, and it might become clear which way is better as more information is gained. For now, your prediction is based on nothing.

I think that there are two major questions left to answer:

1. What is the optimal maximum block size?
2. Will fees alone be enough to secure Bitcoin?

I don't think that anyone knows the answers to those questions yet.

Regarding the optimal block size, I think that there needs to be a way to incentivize miners to reach an equilibrium. Technocrats dictating a policy is the absolute worst way to approach it. An unlimited block size might be the answer, but I suspect that it would not as it would turn into tragedy-of-the-commons problem.

Regarding security through fees alone, there is no way to know if fees are enough without knowing what amount of fees are necessary to secure the block chain, how much people will be willing to pay, and how big the blocks will be.

Actually the more important question is not about any of that, it is all about the price of bitcoin. Saying block reward won't be enough to secure the network is actually saying that bitcoin price is not going to be high enough (or would drop hard) to ensure hashrate remains high enough to make attacks impossible due to extremely high costs.

So far we have no reason to believe that. With 50BTC per block reward miners were making less than a dollar. Last cycle when they were making 12.5BTC per block that was between $8k to $75k and today it is $230k for only 6.25BTC per block.
You see bitcoin doesn't even need the fees to keep the incentive so much higher than needed for security, not only that but also this won't change any time soon.

This means even if we cut the reward by half today to 3.125BTC (instead of in a couple of years when price could be a lot higher than now) the miners would still be making $115k which is a lot higher than what they were making when the reward was 12.5BTC.

Price only matters as long as there is a subsidy. I assume that when we talk about long-term, we are talking about post-subsidy.

The quote was talking about 2030 so it was more of the short-long-term. And the post-subsidy is not for about 100 years, I find it kind of moot to discuss it now since we simply can't know how anything would be in 2100 for instance!

it doesn't seem optimal to depend wholly on price, as is the case with the large block size/low fee revenue model. as block rewards drop and drop, miners will become increasingly sensitive to price changes, potentially leading to large swings in hash rate.

to prevent that, fee revenue must rise to dampen the effect of the falling block subsidy. that means restricting block size, probably rather conservatively.


this is the early adopter phase when the block subsidy is still relatively high. how about in......12 years or 16 years? then the issue of block size will be extremely important because fees will be the primary source of mining income.

There is a glimpse of hope that by the time we get to that phase, the market would've matured enough such that huge price movements would be less common. It would also signify that miners are just having a thin profit margin and shutting down the bulk of their equipment would be more worth than just keeping it running to earn a marginal profit.

I see block rewards as a way to distribute the coins but as the block subsidy decreases, the adoption rate would've increased. Currently, the main offchain scaling solution is LN. If the only time the on-chain transactions are needed is to open and close the channel, I would think that the total on-chain fees would increase while still having the same or even more utility.

For the fees to completely replace block rewards, assuming current levels should bring the fees about x6 more expensive and/or x6 increase in transactions/block. I would think that given time, the problem could be resolved. There is still a few years until block rewards would form a big bulk of the miner's profit.

Not as much as you might think.
Both the cost of a 51% attack and the possible double spending gains scale linearly with Bitcoin price.
Security is about the mining reward being a sufficiently high fraction of circulating supply.

Again we can not predict the future but only see the past so far and extrapolate. There has never been any effects of falling block subsidy and it has gone from 50 all the way down to 6.25 (-87%) while the price and revenue has grown significantly more (380million%).

I have also disagreed with saying block size has to be restricted to force the fees to increase. The "fee revenue" doesn't have to be from the same number of transactions, it can be increased by taking it from more number of transactions (aka increasing capacity).

The mining reward will go down gradually, which is good, and the price should keep rising significantly over the next few halvings, allowing the falling mining reward to still offer a lot of $$. This will keep mining profit viable for a long time even when mining reward gets pretty small. But say by 2044, when the mining reward is less than 0.1 BTC, even if the price is $2 million (which it might reasonably be by then, but it might not), that reward is going to be less than it is now. Since the price by that time will be doing nothing close to doubling every four years, as Bitcoin will have long since matured into a slower growing more stable market, we run into a problem. And that problem will only get worse by a century later when price won't even matter because there will be no mining reward beyond tx fees.

Increasing the supply cap is not an option. Period. That will never happen. But of course there is a far more practical solution: increase the block size. The only reason to keep the block size stuck at its small size is to make it easier for people with slower internet to mine by not having to propagate large amounts of bytes around the network, and the worry this would hurt decentralization and therefore security. Storage is less a concern because storage gets cheap at a quick rate. Obviously by now network speeds have already increased since Bitcoin launched, and even then the block size limit was likely pretty conservative. It is entirely reasonable to say by like 2040 we could 10x the block size, letting in 10x as much tx fee to go to miners, not hurt decentralization at all, and allow more actual real world usage of bitcoin, 10-fold as much usage. And it is certainly reasonable to think that by 2140 we could 10x block size again (if not 100x it) to allow mining to be well worth it given tx fees, keep fees low, allow much more usage of Bitcoin.

Increasing block size is the only long term solution to the diminishing mining rewards. It would have been nice if this had been dealt with in 2017 when there was all the controversy over scaling upgrades, and before Bitcoin really achieved the global relevancy that it is on the verge of staring to get today, but instead all we got was a measly ~2x segwit upgrade. At some point Bitcoin developers will have to take this seriously and hard fork to a more future proof Bitcoin network that allows many times more transactions in order to keep mining profitable. The best way would just be too include a blocksize modifier that gets that gets activated in parallel with each halvening, so that every four years as block reward goes down tx fee reward goes up from more room from transactions, plus you only ever have to do one hard fork for this instead of multiple. So far there has been a complete failure from the community to seriously address this problem. It's just been religious-like bullshit between "small blockers" and "large blockers" which is just stupid.

The amount of miners income from transaction fees is already quite high...
But the level of this income is quite variable, one might be concerned about whether this could form the basis of Bitcoin's security in the future.

However, there a factor that is usually completely overlooked in such discussions: merged mining (Satoshi's idea).
Merged mining is currently in use, with Elastos (main chain and PoW sidechains), Namecoin, Syscoin and a bunch of other coins.

As a rule, none of these coins compete with Bitcoin due to slightly lower (and Bitcoin dependent, of course) decentralization and security.

But aren't they great for contributing to Bitcoin's security in the future?

Merged mining seems to have growth potential.
Especially if someone understands the limitations of securing a coin only with a proof of stake.

It looks like those coins combined account for less than 0.1% of Bitcoin's daily issuance, and thus have negligible contribution to Bitcoin security.

I presented this as a possible scenario of the distant future in which the Bitcoin security problem turns out to be purely academic.

As of today, merged mining is not relevant, obviously (maybe except for those responsible for running large mining pools).

you can't just extrapolate into the future since the current primary component of the block reward (inflation) won't be there in the future. we can argue about how to properly account for that, but to assume the current price/hash rate dynamics will continue indefinitely as inflation is phased out---that's just not reasonable to me.


i'm not confident in that assumption. we need a deeper theoretical analysis of fee market dynamics before we can assume that. without fee pressure from restricted block size, fee revenue drops exponentially---that's all i know.

There are millions of frozen coins.

As time marches on I believe the old frozen coins will be lifted from inactive accounts.

2024  =  3.125
2028  =  1.5625
2032  =  0.78125
2036  =  0.390625
2040  =  0.1953125
2044  =  0.09765625
2048  =  0.048828125


I think there could be a call to unlock the 2009 frozen accounts in 2039 or later.

the 21mill are still intact. Just recycle the frozen ones.

Many banks remove stale accounts with notice.  If they do this the issue leaves. For a long time.

interesting idea, but it sounds controversial and unlikely to gain consensus. lots of bitcoin users expressed dismay at the idea of burning unmoved coins in a hypothetical transition to a post-quantum signature algorithm: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/4isxjr/petition_to_protect_satoshis_coins/d30we6f/

this occurs to me as the same ethical dilemma---whether to deprive people of their coins in an effort to secure the system. it would be like charging a form of demurrage that users never agreed to in the first place.

There are two problems with this idea. First is the fact that you are talking about altcoins and we can not rely on altcoins to even exist after a certain time let alone have enough value to be worth (merge)mining. Second is the fact that no proper cryptocurrency would ever rely on another cryptocurrency for its existence. They will always aim to be stand alone. The "parasitic altcoins" are always low quality useless ones.

That I could agree with. We need to reach a good balance where fees don't go high to unreasonable levels while making sure they don't fall down to zero either and at the same time ensure decentralized nature of bitcoin.

Bitcoin is not a bank, there is no account, there is no frozen account/coins.
And nobody should ever have the power to move someone else's coins just because they weren't moved in X number of days/years.

There is no benefit.

I want to shed a different light on this issue:

From a pure theoretical perspective it is inappropriate for a monetary system to put a hard cap on the money inflation process because any such system has to incorporate/support user interactions that have nonzero error rate including fatal errors that lead to the loss of money, a continuous leak of the money to non-existence and reduction of the total supply, hence a currency with capped supply vanishes in some future, and a long time before it happens, it will become obsolete/antique because of its limited supply volume.

It is hard to tell that the above argument has any practical application for bitcoin because what is done, is done. But if I was to decide about it in the first day, unlike Satoshi, I'd never stop the supply completely.  I think he did it for some kind of marketing policy, telling people that bitcoin is a rare resource, blah, blah ... yet I think it was not the best Satoshi's decision ever because, all the coins we have in circulation today will be lost sometime, somehow by someone. Right? Unlike bitcoin that is designed to be a "rare resource", time is available enough in the universe, it wins every race.

Assuming a yearly 1% loss rate, it will take approximately 1375 years for supply to dwindle down from 21M BTC to 21 BTC.
If by that time, each satoshi has subdivided further into 10^6 subunits, then the system can keep functioning mostly as is.
Adding on average one decimal every 229 years should suffice.

There is a continuous leak, but it will not necessarily cause the currency to vanish or lead to a "limited supply volume" (if I am interpreting those words correctly).

Suppose 20 million of the 21 million bitcoins are lost forever. That still leaves 100,000,000,000,000 satoshis, each of which could be potentially be subdivided further into 2⁶⁴ "nakamotos", giving a total supply of about 2x10³³ nakamotos. We should be ok for a few more millennia with that.

there's obviously a short term benefit if long term mining incentives turn out to be insufficient: kicking the can down the road. but given that it doesn't address the underlying problem---that miners would either need more inflation or more fee revenue to maintain adequate security---it just doesn't seem worth the ethical baggage of stealing peoples' coins.

i actually like the idea of a requirement to move coins every x blocks (could be years) and having that rule baked into the consensus system. it would make certain transitions (like dropping ECDSA for a quantum resistant signature) so much easier. it would also make for a much more predictable supply because it would be audited periodically (with non complying coins burned and/or recirculated), rather than having us perpetually ponder how many millions of lost coins there are.

ethically and re network consensus, it's much too late to do that sort of thing in bitcoin, but if i were to design a consensus system from scratch this is something i'd consider.

You get it wrong just like @tromp, and Satoshi I suppose:
Inflation is a mechanism for "distributing" money to fresh actors but the mechanism that you propose, does not help with distribution. To understand the problem deeply, one needs to think in the edges and twilight when your hypothetical precision game is not kicked off and people are dealing with a monetary system's token that is not capable to be stored and exchanged smoothly because it is too rare/expensive and does not cover everyday business.

You suggest that in such a case some guy named Luke jr VI or Gregory Maxwell III shows up and proposes a soft fork for including new transaction formats and more precision points and everything becomes under control again, but it is not the case. Instead, by incremental reduction in availability of money, the economy gradually shifts to other devices, and it pushes the money to an even more antique status, demand decreases while the value preserves or even increases, and it makes everything worse in a positive feedback mechanism.

It is how things work in the real world and if we are arguing in a pure paradigm, there also my argument stands still that such a hard-capped supply ends to extinction. I mean, look at it again, it is so obvious that a system without input dies eventually. Right?


P.S.
I understand that such an antique situation for bitcoin is considered as a good status by some people, Actually we are hearing it over and over about bitcoin being rare and worthy because of this rareness. This is not a technical debate anymore when it comes to such wrong interpretations of bitcoin and I have zero interest to argue with people who believe in bitcoin as an antique article.

You failed to provide any convincing arguments for this though.
Precision will be added simply as a result of a satoshi becoming too valuable to be a smallest unit,
not because too much bitcoin has been lost (which we'll never know except by vague guesses).

I understand the sentiment of your post, that you think a tail emission makes much more sense
than a capped supply (I am in that camp myself).

But Bitcoin, being the dominant player that it its, may be one of the very few PoW coins that can make a hard cap work in the long run. It just needs to maintain that backlog of high fee paying transactions.

I don't need to, it is how things are working right now, and we have people that are endorsing it, as I said, they are talking about world reserve currency, digital gold, diamond, etc. it is the path.

I've rebuked it already: precision doesn't change anything re-distribution and supply matters. In the Third World countries, central banks take a same approach in the opposite directions for their bloated fiat currencies by removing few zeros from the unit, ask any economist and he or she tells you that it has no significant outcome.

Statistically speaking, leaking occurs mainly in the most active parts of the network and should be addressed right there, miners are the best candidates available for this purpose

Good to know  :)

It is not maintainable, at least there is no strong evidence that it holds in the long run, and now it is you who didn't provide any convincing argument.

  Gold buried dozens of empire to the ground,it has no capped supply.Mined for thousand years continously. That is the unbreakable,undeniable money. Adopted all over the world.

Suppose that a few oligarchs or rich elite accumulated more than 10 million coins. The more and more centralized and manipulated,less network and loose power.

Defending a capped supply in money,or commodity is absurd.

Only capped supply valuable is time.24 Hour 60 minutes. Thats it.

Yes, an emission modeled after time, at 1 per second forever (600 block reward) would have been very interesting.
Then the inflation rate would currently be at around 8%, and would take decades more to fall under 2%.
That requires a lot of patience. But it could have made Bitcoin more attractive to later generations.

Shower thought. "Extending" the block/mining rewards might not be "in the discussion" today, but to maintain Bitcoin as a multi-generational protocol, I'm confident everyone will get to consensus on ANY PRACTICAL solution if it is "life or death" for Bitcoin.

Well, I think extending the block is not needed. Probably doing some kind of cut-through (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=281848.0) is a better idea, especially in non-interactive way, but we can of course start with some interactive version to see how it will turn out in practice. Practically speaking, joining many transactions and applying cut-through on them will raise their satoshi per byte value, so effectively it will also give miners more coins per block while taking less space to store them. For now, I don't see any reasons to reject such cut-through by anyone. Thoughts?

The so-called "interactive" version of cut-through is just a stupid idea which actually is the original version, lol, and no, it doesn't help miners a bit because the interactive phase is done by the users involved in the chain to keep their own fees low, and it is why they'd engage in this "interaction".

As of non-interactive cut-through, I made a few comments in the original thread trying to convince the op, GM, about the possibilities, impacts, and a very special use-case: compressing the history, received negative feedback and insistence on the stupid version.

BTW, I liked your comment and proposed algorithm, but do your best to convince Gregory, and good luck with that. ;)

Guys, don't worry, all will be fine.
Since nobody attacks BCH and BSV, we can assume that Bitcoin will remain secure even if it's hashrate will fall down 200 times. So we can expect that Bitcoin won't have issues with security by 2060. By that time many of us will be dead. My prediction is the following:
1) First, casual users will abandon Bitcoin due to high tx fees. Bitcoin will become a vault, "a hedge against inflation".
2) Mining resources will be gradually redirected to another more perspective network. Probably it will be a fork of Bitcoin with better economics and scalability.
3) Bitcoin will be used and supported by institutions. Nobody will allow him to "die" since "he became to big". It was predicted by Satoshi.
Everybody will be happy.  ;)

That isn't a great way to reason about security. To give an example: Namecoin went with zero protection against stealing names for many years... and then suddenly a bunch were stolen at once.

A lack of attack so far doesn't mean something is secure.

Now-- bitcoin could probably lose hashpower and still be secure enough (esp because you could respond by just waiting days until you considered a transaction final...),  but I don't think you can conclude much from the lack of attack against some random low hashpower scamcoins.  A safer conclusion is that there is such a tiny amount of real economic activity behind them it just hasn't been worth the time and there are more profitable things to attack.

Let's accept the mentioned coins are secure and never experience 51% attack but it will be unfair to compare how secure any altcoin hashrate was when dip with what will happen to Bitcoin if it happens that it hashrate is low when we know that Bitcoin is already a target by online attackers etc.
Nevertheless, BCH and BSV are shady projects and a con person will know how to find his through people like him.

ETC is also among the victim of the 51% attack.

Future:
Block 2730000, Year 2060, Reward Era 14, block reward 0.00610351, coins in circulation 20.9 million or 99.99%

The last 0.01% of block rewards for miners will take 80 more years. Between now and 2030 we will see what happens. Between 2030 and 2060, another 30 years, will add about 1% to the coin supply from mining block rewards and price should have either stabilized or gone through the roof (the moon, whatever.)

If bitcoin lasts another 12 years, it's going to have a very good future. I would not worry about it for now.

Don't you think this idea is more productive than all this ETH 2.0 PoS sharding story? Literally, their sharding is doing just the same thing with many extra steps.


What is your prediction?

gmax, I ask this out of respect, and more out of curiousity, than challenging your views. But did the Core developers think about the long-term future of mining, when the network relies only on fees for security? Was there any Core developer who believes that changing the block reward schedule is possible if it was “life or death” for Bitcoin?