On bitcoin's very long term future without miner rewards

[tromp]

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.

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[Wind_FURY]

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.

[ertil]

Well, I think extending the block is not needed. Probably doing some kind of cut-through 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?

[aliashraf]

Well, I think extending the block is not needed. Probably doing some kind of cut-through 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.

[IShishkin]

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.  

[gmaxwell]

Since nobody attacks BCH and BSV, we can assume that Bitcoin will remain secure even if it's hashrate will fall down 200 times.

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.

[suzanne5223]

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.

Not if the condition allows you to perform 51% attack and earn profit by doing it.

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.

Many PoW altcoin (such as Bitcoin Gold/BTG) suffer from 51% attack because,

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

[Dabs]

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.

[IShishkin]

Merged mining is currently in use, with Elastos (main chain and PoW sidechains), Namecoin, Syscoin and a bunch of other coins.

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).

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.

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.

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.

Not if the condition allows you to perform 51% attack and earn profit by doing it.

What is your prediction?

[Wind_FURY]

Since nobody attacks BCH and BSV, we can assume that Bitcoin will remain secure even if it's hashrate will fall down 200 times.

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.

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?