I believe the usual solution has been to discard all self-respect and start spamming the forum with poorly constructed doom-and-gloom threads from a million newbie accounts. Don't ask me why, I'm guessin it's some variation on that affirmations hoodoo people are getting into.

Following OP's advice, you still wouldn't have had the opportunity to turn a profit. It's easy to predict that what goes up must come down. Much harder to say from how high and how low subsequently.

I still don't see why this is better than, you know, a database.

That's some crappy volume on Bitstamp, for a 15 USD move.

I guess I jumped the gun before, my well-wishes got buried in political bickering. so...

What a year, huh?

If the price goes down, profit from an attack will likely go down as well, and vice versa if price goes up. Correspondingly, the amount spent on security in currency should likewise go down, or up. The cost of "sufficient" security as percentage of market cap should remain roughly the same.

Does this make sense?

AlexGR: That's true about transaction types, but realistically the total spent on fees+subsidy will have to go down a lot either way. Security being cost to attack vs. cost to defend, it makes more sense to look at mining costs as percent of market cap than miner revenue in currency.

edit: erm, meant to say potential profit vs. cost to attack, which is determined by the amount spent on defense

Hopefully by at least that much. 2.5% annual costs would be much more reasonable, but still pretty damn high for store-of-value users. If you're not going to cater to a userbase who sees money transfer as  the most interesting option, it seems like it gets much harder to keep Bitcoin secure and have it be competitive compared to other ways of storing wealth.

The balance of store-of-value (few tx on the blockchain) vs. money transfer (lots of tx on the blockchain) should be decided by the market. Artificially limiting blocksize is making a policy decision to favour store-of-value without knowing what a free market would "prefer"

Edit: This was sloppy writing. Ideally the free market would decide, but probably we have to make policy decisions either way, since there are other considerations for blocksize, mainly resource usage. If tx/sec can be increased without increasing resource usage, that's even better than a blocksize raise, but I'm not convinced of that yet.

What good would that do? The mining subsidy is the single biggest reason miners suck off such a large portion of wealth stored in BTC at the moment. Mining subsidy coupled with bullish price expectations, that is. (An inflation-corrected BTCUSD chart would probably be pretty illuminating...)

Obviously security is important. But 10% of the stored value yearly to provide that security?  That compounds rather drastically over time, are you really saying we should not fret about it?

The obvious conclusion is that whatever the target group, users will not pay that amount. No-one is going to "store their wealth" in Bitcoin if it costs them 10% yearly to do so. Miners will simply have to settle for less in fees than they currently get as subsidy and the blockchain will hopefully remain secure enough to be attractive.

Pushing for higher miner fees is barking up the wrong tree. Either we manage with lower fees or the system fails, if you ask me. This will be the case regardless of transaction rate.

It's about finding the balance between security and cost. For rough purposes, security = miner revenue. If we're defending against a 51% attack, we should be able to estimate the minimum cost of mining sufficient to provide security: It should be more than the profits an attacker can gain at any given time, but not much  more.

Currently, the cost seems too high to me in terms of % of value spent on mining yearly. Largely this is because of the block subsidy, so hopefully as the block subsidy dwindles, fees *will not* go up proportionally. I'm hoping we're currently overspending on security - if that's not the case and the current resource usage is necessary for network security, I think we have much bigger problems than transaction rate.

Wow. It's been pretty obvious MP is an egomaniac only interested in self-aggrandizement, but I didn't expect his superman syndrome to cloud his judgment quite so far as to publicly offer a death bounty on someone. Unsurprisingly trilema.com is now down, but I checked the cached version of that article and it really is what the URL implies.

This is the kind of thing that gets people locked up.

What do you mean by "sustainable"?

If you mean "will economic incentives guarantee security for transactions on the Bitcoin blockchain", then the answer is... I don't know, but it seems likely.

Basically, a single party with malicious intent getting 51% or more of the hashrate is the scenario we need to avoid. So, economically speaking, potential gains from double-spend attacks need to be lower than the cost of gaining that much hashrate. As long as that is true, it doesn't matter what happens to miners.

Unless you want to get into attacks not motivated by direct profit... I don't know how to evaluate the risk/reward proposals there, though.

You mean you disagree with DeathandTaxes on some issue, or that they scammed someone?

There's no minimum fee dictated by the protocol. You can send 0-fee transactions if you wish.

As for no spam attack, what else would you call the "stress tests" we had?

Or to make sure it looks like you're profiting. How many times have people "invested" their BTC, looking for gains, only to find their trusted third party running away with the money?

Still no verbs in these, or any semblance of grammar.

IIRC, Proudhon said he'd found all the trolling he was doing had an unfortunate effect on him and decided to stop. Rather respectable, really.

Lambie is actually on the ball here. Bitcoin's best use case is illicit transactions. It's a tool to reduce the power states have over their subjects. The overhead involved only makes sense if  you can't rely on a central power to keep people in line.

IOW, if you're fine with how the political process works in your jurisdiction, and see no need to curtail the economic powers of the state, I don't see what good Bitcoin is to you apart from speculating on the price. I doubt it's actually more efficient than VISA all things considered, for example.