And the dollar has crushed btc in the 2021 nov 1 to 2022 oct 1 time-slot.
And btc has buried the dollar in the 2009 jan to 2022 oct time slot .
we can go on and on.
My 140000 doge was worth 280 bucks in 2020 it is now worth around 8400
My doge will never run out of rewards. and every year the inflation of doge decreases.
BTC will run out of rewards and the key question will be how well does the LN feed coins to miners.
as I have stated I am 65 this issue will come to a head down the road. Most likely I will be gone when this happens say.
2024 3.12500000 coin reward
2028 1.56250000 coin reward
2032 0.78125000 coin reward
2036 0.39062500 coin reward
2040 0.19581250 coin reward I am 83.
At this point in time LN will have really saved mining or killed it off only 18 years from now.
Just saying
oh I still stack btc but frankly the numbers above are a cause for concern.
The lightning network is not really what will drive this. If it continues to be a success it will be one major customer for block space on the base layer. But there will be other customers. All the other layer 2 stuff, and all the folks wanting to do base layer transactions for whatever reason.
Miners will either survive on fees, or not. That is the crux of it.
Napkin math and thoughts:
Currently the block subsidy is ~$125k
With 1000-3000 transactions per block we are looking at fees needing to be $40-125 per transaction on the base layer.
Many individual coin moves can be bundled into a single transaction bringing the cost per tx down effectively for the consumer
Increasing the block size is not 100% out of the question, but VERY contentious.
Adding a tail emission to Bitcoin is even MORE contentious.
We can NEVER make blocks big enough to do all transactions on the base layer without breaking the distributed part of the tech
Therefore 2nd layer tech is an ABSOLUTE necessity both for keeping the ledger decentralized, as well as making payments cheap.
Either fees become fairly high, and most of us transact for coffee on other layers, or Bitcoin is only ever used by a small subset of the world population (recently saw the Samourai guys claiming that is the future which they believe - I do not see how, though)
So, in my opinion lightning and other Layer 2 tech does not threaten miners AT ALL. In fact it is quite the contrary. Without it miners would have no hope of the fees ever being able to go high enough to support them. Layer 2 MAY indeed have a cost to the miners NOW in that it is taking pressure off the need for blockspace. But until fees go up, that is what the subsidy is for.