Are you trying to proclaim that you have any meaningful knowledge about bitcoin fee direction into the future based on various past events and even our most recent low fee situation?
I am telling what everyone can see
- Fees are dirt cheap yet still without 0.20sat/vb ordinals blocks would be half empty
- Go to any casino and watch the tickers, people barely sue Bitcoin anymore
- Look at the signature campaign on the forum, a ton of them pay either on their own website or in usdt
- We are hovering just below an ATH and we are experiencing the lowest fees ever
Usage is down the drain no matter how cheap tx are, so why would people pay 10-50x times for something they don't need now?
First I had to respond in order to fix your quotes.
Second,.. You sound negative for the mere sake of it. Yes. Fees are down, and transactions seem to be down too, so miners are being incentivized by rewards only, and transactions are being allowed to go through for nearly free.. or at least very low prices relative to the value in connection with being able to do a transaction on the blockchain. It seems quite powerful and valuable for rich folks, poor folks and really anyone, to be able to send transactions for low amounts (such as a coffee) or billions of dollars for nearly free. Almost too good to be true.. even though the security of such does seem to be being subsidized by the rewards, and difficulty continues to go up, so there is no shortage of miners wanting to compete for rewards, even absent their getting much if any fees.
https://explorer.cloverpool.com/btc/insights-difficultyAre you going to pay 5$ in fees when paying your utility bills, when you can pay just 2 cents with Doge or LTC?
Of course not!
bitcoin fees are like $0.20 or so.. and sure, maybe for the small to medium transactions in the $20 to $300 price range, we might not want to use bitcoin, even though right now the transactions on bitcoin are economical, so if bitcoin is offered, I may well rather use bitcoin for something that is $20 to $300. If the transaction is smaller than $20 then I might have to consider how I might pay, and what is being accepted by a merchant or someone else with whom I might want to carry out relatively small transactions.
There might be some shittier chains that get some of the transaction in the future.. That is possible. I had not noticed which merchants are accepting Doge and/or LTC and not accepting bitcoin.. but yeah, there can be variance by country too, yet I suppose if merchants were excepting either bitcoin or the shittier chains, then it could be that i might do some of the smaller transactions on some shitcoin.. sure. It is possible.. I would have to compare the options available, the size of the transaction and whether I might have any of those coins available on my phone or whether I might pay from my computer when it comes time to pay.
I might be sorry to ask (since you seem to be way more inclined than me to consider that some things in bitcoin are broken), yet, nonetheless, do you think that bitcoin needs to be changed in current times and if so are there any practical changes that could be accomplished to address possible issues regarding the seeming incentives to pay lower and lower fees?
To make people use Bitcoin you need Bitcoin to be cheaper and at least as fast as the rest, it's simple.
Perhaps. It depends on what you are buying and whether you need final confirmation or merely 1 confirmation or just to see it as pending. Anyone going to double spend a cup of coffee?
I get skeptical when anyone says, "it's simple."
Of course, lightning is pretty fast, yet I have found that sometimes lighting is not very cheap for some transactions that is are several hundred dollars, but for transactions of less than $100 lightning tends to be quite reasonable.
This can't be achieved anymore, Bitcoin lost the utility war when it refused to grow in capacity and let other networks take over.
You seem to be giving up too soon. Bitcoin seems to have utility that is greater than just smaller transactions, even though I am not going to claim to know where all the transactions are supposedly happening. I hear USDT on Tron gets a lot of small transactions in recent times...and surely if I want to transact directly to buy anything from someone else, whether a utility bill or a yacht, or real estate or even hookers, lambos and blow, I can still do those on bitcoin. There is nothing stopping the transactions from being done, beyond the current existence of low fees.
I am starting to regret that I asked.
Otherwise, are you presuming that bitcoin is doomed into oblivion and that currently there is any kind of meaningful competition out there?
On the current fee block reward model? Yup!
But fortunately enough, it's nothing that would affect me, the real consequences would only appear in a few decades, as the balance between the value of the assets protected by miners compared to the fee they receive will be laughable. But since I will be long retired by then, it's not my war to die for anymore.
Your trajectory might not play out. I doubt that it is so cut and dry that folks are not going to transact on bitcoin, especially if we are looking at a few decades into the future.. .and surely, if you are even saying that bitcoin might kind of work but a few decades from now, it is going to be fucked, I just don't buy it... There are several factors besides the mere existence of some shitcoins currently serving as a means for transactions to take place.
By the way, I presume the 200-WMA to be more important than spot price in terms of measuring bitcoin's value and its value direction, which historically the 200-WMA has always been up, including never going lower than 20% per year (during the period of June 2022 to November 2023 was the lowest in bitcoin's history, so far), and even if the rate of UP goes lower in the future, we are still likely getting doublings every 2-5 years quite a way into the future, and even if it takes longer to get a doubling, it seems that BTC prices have been outstripping the bitcoin block rewards in order to continue to provide incentives to mine blocks even if the proportion going to fees continues to be a relatively low portion of that.
Yeah, too bad it's not keeping up with what is protected
2020 vs now
https://bitinfocharts.com/ vs
https://archive.ph/WJXp8Market Capitalization $2,269,064,080,831 vs $276,567,252,469 USD x8
Reward last 24h $51,331,633.07 vs $16,208,177 USD x3
Just doubling the reward will only mean that the security is the same, while the assets guarded double every time; you're basically still having the same 60-year-old guy that guarded an ice cream shop in charge of Fort Knox alone.
I don't see any tragedy in the numbers that you gave.. assuming that they include reward and transaction fees. Sure. Transaction fees (and reward) could be higher, but miners are still mining and I doubt that we have enough data to proclaim that onchain transactions are not going to be enough, whether we are talking 10 years, 20 years, 30 years or some other quantity of year into the future. A lot can happen, even in one decade.
