I read this reddit.
I'm not so sure that this "tragedy of the commons",
would be fatal... which is the central argument of this Reddit post.
What the Redditor is saying is the following:
If you have a normal minimum fee, say .0001 BTC,
what happens if a large pool drops their minimum fee
to half that? Most users would only pay the new
minimum of .00005, content to wait till that pool mines their
next block. With such a small fee, it is likely that
no one can make money and so many miners will give up
and drop out of the network or switch to that pool.
So far the argument makes sense.
However, how does the pool that is driving everyone out
pay their bills? They have to eventually raise their
fees to at least cover costs.
Any way you slice it, a new equilibrium will be reached.
It's just a different version of what we have today,
where the difficulty level reaches an equilibrium based on
how money miners are able to afford to invest
into hashing power.
Yes, when subsidies are gone or greatly diminished,
the overall network hashrate may be lower than it is today,
depending on the transaction volume. Perhaps transaction fees
would become percentage based if volume was low.
But I still think it would be possible to have the free market
work it out without limiting the blocksize. The only question
would be how much security would we get.
If security is low because transaction volume is low,
the idea behind limiting the blocksize would be to
squeeze more dollars out of that limited pool of
transactions. But by what factor can they increase it over
the free market? Can they double it? Triple it?
If X hashes/second is insufficient, who is to say that 3X is?
It's a very interesting topic and probably some mathematical
models can be run.
But I think the blanket statement made here is false, unless someone
can show me otherwise with some hard figures.
P.S. Still semi-ignoring this thread because of all the noise.
Don't expect me to reply to your response unless you make
a solid point. Thanks.
