BTC Security Broken?

[mpoletiek]

This is a well thought out thread in my opinion.

Here's the summary:

"
BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market.
"

Is there a gaping hole in this argument?

https://x.com/Justin_Bons/status/1810357305390616839

[coolcoinz]

BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market.
"

Is there a gaping hole in this argument?

What's an extremely high fee? What's high for you may be low for someone else.


In 2019 the average fee was around $1
In 2021 it was $2. In 2023 it went up a bit again, but stayed around $2.5.
I don't count extremes where due to congestion it skyrocketed above $20, which happened in 2018, 2021 and 2024.
What makes you think the fee will be much higher in the coming years? The history points towards a slow and gradual increase. You can still send a $2 tx if you want and it will go through.

[mpoletiek]

What's an extremely high fee? What's high for you may be low for someone else.


In 2019 the average fee was around $1
In 2021 it was $2. In 2023 it went up a bit again, but stayed around $2.5.
I don't count extremes where due to congestion it skyrocketed above $20, which happened in 2018, 2021 and 2024.
What makes you think the fee will be much higher in the coming years? The history points towards a slow and gradual increase. You can still send a $2 tx if you want and it will go through.

I guess that's debatable, but I'm reluctant to say that a $2 fee is acceptable for a cup of coffee. That being said, I think Justin Bon's is saying that as the amount of rewards per block decrease TX fee's will continue to increase and must replace the miner's revenue from mining blocks otherwise they will exit the ecosystem. Current block sizes and a reduction in miners producing blocks will also increase TX fees?

[Mr.right85]

"
BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market.
"

Is there a gaping hole in this argument?

What makes rarities or antiques valued the way they are in our everyday society?

To answer that I would say simply because they are hard to come by and someone somewhere is willing to pay an unbelievable amount just to own it.

You can say the same goes for Bitcoin. If you look at it, the fee isn’t always that high, depending on the amount your sending at any point in time. Also, the intent you wish to archive which wouldn’t be far from privacy wouldn’t keep you far away from the innovation.

It really isn’t up to the fees you know, the purpose for which you wish to archive with it. You can swiftly get a large some across and get things done from the comfort of your home without following any definite procedure or stands to be audited on a transaction. This too is okay to keep things going for Bitcoin.

[Jating]

What's an extremely high fee? What's high for you may be low for someone else.


In 2019 the average fee was around $1
In 2021 it was $2. In 2023 it went up a bit again, but stayed around $2.5.
I don't count extremes where due to congestion it skyrocketed above $20, which happened in 2018, 2021 and 2024.
What makes you think the fee will be much higher in the coming years? The history points towards a slow and gradual increase. You can still send a $2 tx if you want and it will go through.

I guess that's debatable, but I'm reluctant to say that a $2 fee is acceptable for a cup of coffee. That being said, I think Justin Bon's is saying that as the amount of rewards per block decrease TX fee's will continue to increase and must replace the miner's revenue from mining blocks otherwise they will exit the ecosystem. Current block sizes and a reduction in miners producing blocks will also increase TX fees?

I don't know if you are aware of Lightning Network (LN), it's a second layer protocol that is being developed for small and micropayment transactions like for a cup of coffee. Here is a good introduction,

[All Lightning Network Threads In One Place.

I'm not sure who is Justin Bon's though, but we all know that fees are dynamic and recently there was a deliberate attack that's why the tx fees goes as high as we have never seen before. But guess what, now it's back to normal, and so those kind of attacks are not sustainable, and it will cost a lot of money to them or the project that they have created have died down already.

You can also check the tx fees here: https://mempool.space/

[SquirrelJulietGarden]

What's an extremely high fee? What's high for you may be low for someone else.


In 2019 the average fee was around $1
In 2021 it was $2. In 2023 it went up a bit again, but stayed around $2.5.
I don't count extremes where due to congestion it skyrocketed above $20, which happened in 2018, 2021 and 2024.
What makes you think the fee will be much higher in the coming years? The history points towards a slow and gradual increase. You can still send a $2 tx if you want and it will go through.

Bitcoin transaction fee is paid in bitcoin or its smallest unit, satoshi.

Assuming that in future, Bitcoin continues its adoption and price growth, with higher price of Bitcoin, transaction fee will become higher with same fee rate. Not yet considering that with bigger adoption, same capacity of Bitcoin block to handle number of transactions, people might have to join fee rate race and use higher fee rate, this will be a second factor to cause higher and more expensive transaction fee.

Transaction fees depend on demand that is usually higher in bull market but if people know well about Bitcoin mempools, they can wait and plan for transactions in times of mempools without congestion.

[avikz]

This is a well thought out thread in my opinion.

Here's the summary:

"
BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market.
"

Is there a gaping hole in this argument?

https://x.com/Justin_Bons/status/1810357305390616839

A lot of people do no realize that high transaction fees is a problem! Even if someone realizes, they would not recognize! But the high transaction fees is indeed a problem that needs a resolution. However, the way current network is designed and the halving events are organized, I don't see much hope here! Miners who have invested heavily into ASICs to mine Bitcoins, will have to make profit out of it. As the mining reward part is constant and reducing, the only variable here is the transaction fees. So if I am a miner, I would want to transaction fees to go up so that I can make profit. I don't see an immediate resolution to this pain point.

A temporary solution will be to ban all ordinals from the network so that they can't block the network. That might give a temporary relief to us. But a long term solution needs to be worked out. Possibly moving from POW to POS can give a long term relief where people wouldn't have to invest a huge amount of money upfront to be able to mine Bitcoin.

[Apocollapse]

I guess that's debatable, but I'm reluctant to say that a $2 fee is acceptable for a cup of coffee. That being said, I think Justin Bon's is saying that as the amount of rewards per block decrease TX fee's will continue to increase and must replace the miner's revenue from mining blocks otherwise they will exit the ecosystem. Current block sizes and a reduction in miners producing blocks will also increase TX fees?

I wonder how much exactly the miners spend to mine Bitcoin and verifying the transactions, then how much they actually earn from that, so we can get better illustration what he said is true or not. We can't just look at the miners revenue graph which continue to drop, because it was rise so high due to ordinals.

I'd say miners will be more centralized, small miners will leave (many already left) and they will move to country where electricity cost is cheaper.

[pooya87]

"BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market."

This is basically the new "bitcoin is bad for the environment" FUD that started a while ago to also justify the ongoing spam attack against Bitcoin that is known as Ordinals.

The flaw in this types of argument is that they forget the price.
You see, miners don't pay their bills in bitcoin, they pay it in fiat. So if they earn 1BTC they pay the same electric bill in fiat (eg. $100) than if they earn 1.2BTC with fees. That means if bitcoin is worth $120 they are already making a profit ($20) and if they earn 1.2BTC they make a bigger profit ($44). In other words they don't need that extra income generated by the fees.

So far the price has been on the rise in the long run (in each halving cycle) and you can't find anybody who would argue that the rise is going to stop here and never go up.
Keep in mind that this is for the near future, like next 10 years. Anything beyond that (like speculating on year 2140 where there is no more coins left to mine) is silly because it is impossible to know how the cryptocurrency and cryptography scene is going to be beyond next 10-20 years let alone talk about 100 years from now!

Bottom line is that high fees is a problem that needs to be fixed specially when it is caused by a spam attack like Ordinals that is exploiting the protocol and is abusing the bitcoin blockchain.

[SilverCryptoBullet]

This is basically the new "bitcoin is bad for the environment" FUD that started a while ago to also justify the ongoing spam attack against Bitcoin that is known as Ordinals.

There are more industries which are worse for environment than Bitcoin mining industry.

Bitcoin Mining Council report on H1 2023.

More details from their report in the video on Youtube

From BMC member data to Global Bitcoin Mining data, the percent of sustainable power mix is 63.1% and 59.9% that are better than many countries like Germany (48.5%), EU (43.5%), United States (31.4%), Canada (22.5%).

Some articles to debunk Bitcoin fud on energy.
https://endthefud.org/energy.html

[Wakhid Mukti]

"BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market."

This is basically the new "bitcoin is bad for the environment" FUD that started a while ago to also justify the ongoing spam attack against Bitcoin that is known as Ordinals.

The flaw in this types of argument is that they forget the price.
You see, miners don't pay their bills in bitcoin, they pay it in fiat. So if they earn 1BTC they pay the same electric bill in fiat (eg. $100) than if they earn 1.2BTC with fees. That means if bitcoin is worth $120 they are already making a profit ($20) and if they earn 1.2BTC they make a bigger profit ($44). In other words they don't need that extra income generated by the fees.

So far the price has been on the rise in the long run (in each halving cycle) and you can't find anybody who would argue that the rise is going to stop here and never go up.
Keep in mind that this is for the near future, like next 10 years. Anything beyond that (like speculating on year 2140 where there is no more coins left to mine) is silly because it is impossible to know how the cryptocurrency and cryptography scene is going to be beyond next 10-20 years let alone talk about 100 years from now!

Bottom line is that high fees is a problem that needs to be fixed specially when it is caused by a spam attack like Ordinals that is exploiting the protocol and is abusing the bitcoin blockchain.

I agree with you, if mining is not profitable logically Bitcoin mining will stop forever from yesterday or today. In fact, more and more new and old miners are expanding their scale. And I am sure that the miners are not stupid or lack knowledge, many of the miners are currently using green energy and environmentally friendly solutions, noise problems and other environmental problems are always being improvised or updated to make them environmentally friendly, even at the level of countries or world governments. also contributed to the improvisation of environmentally friendly Bitcoin mining


Apart from that, regarding what the OP said regarding transaction fees, Bitcoin transaction fees do go up and down but tend to be stable at around $2. The spike in transaction fees that we experienced up to $20 only occurred for a few moments and was not permanent, this is indeed a problem but not that serious considering that even with low fees we can still send Bitcoin even though we have to sacrifice time which can reach 1 week for transactions BTC confirmed. I'm sure Bitcoin developers are still racking their brains to make Bitcoin even better in the future.

[davis196]

It has to double in price every 4 years for a century or sustain extremely high fees!

Just to maintain the present level of security...

Which is impossible, as it would exceed global GDP within decades

Therefore, BTC security is doomed!

1.The Bitcoin transaction fees aren't "extremely high" 24/7. The fees are pretty normal 90% of the time.
2.Why this guy thinks that the "extremely high" transaction fees are some kind of "last line of defense" that guards the overall security of the BTC blockchain? I'm not the biggest expert on blockchain technology, but this idea seems weird to me. Maybe some blockchain expert should explain this in detail.
3.The whole topic about BTC transaction fees being "extremely high" probably would have been completely avoided, if the BTC blockchain wasn't clogged with useless stuff like Runes and Ordinals.
4.I can agree that Bitcoin might not exist in the current state after 100 years, but there's no way for me to see what's going to happen after 100 years.

[TheUltraElite]

I checked that social media account and it seem they are making up conclusions on many blockchains not just bitcoin. Maybe they are right, maybe they are wrong, nobody can predict what bitcoin will become in future. But the usual trend on that account is pessimistic about every coin.

I have my doubts about the integrity of that fund.

However, I agree with @pooya87, I think their comment is spot on. Price of bitcoin in terms of local fiat currencies are never considered when making this statement. Miners need the transaction fee, but the fee will be here for as long as bitcoin exists.

Shifting to POS is a poor choice, in my opinion. Temporary blocking of ordinals seems to be a better solution in the short term.

[Cryptohygenic]

This is a well thought out thread in my opinion.

Here's the summary:

"
BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market.
"

Is there a gaping hole in this argument?

https://x.com/Justin_Bons/status/1810357305390616839

So do you find it discouraging to hold and transact with bitcoin as a course of the excessive fees?
I also do not think the high fees are results to maintain security longways as said but it is usually an index to meet with miners rewards and as a cost of market demands, transactions becomes congested for progressive transactions which as a loophole, transaction are jammed leading to more charges to solving technical factors.

[franky1]

this has already been discussed
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5502446.msg64306383#msg64306383

anyway lets address the points
the first ignorance of the OP's quote is that the assumption that only ~3000 transactions should occur and each transacter should pay more.. when reality is more transactions could and should go into a block and thus each transacter doesnt need to pay more due to more transactions getting into a block to accumulate a better total for a mining pool

the second ignorance of the op is that miners(asics) do not select the transactions. they just hash no matter if a block is full or empty. its the mining POOLS that select the transactions and even if there were not many unconfirmed transactions waiting, a pool can set a minimum fee to accept thus there is also not a need for network policy to have set defaults to bump/force a fee up.. the mining pools make the choices

pools can also decide how full a block needs to be, if the blocks had a network policy of say xxmb. this does not force pools to fill a block to xxmb if it caused network propagation congestion. the pools will see the delay of their block candidate propagation if it got too full and so would decrease transactions in a block even if the limit was higher(as the case of blocks only filled <0.5mb when the limit was 1mb 2009-2013)

so with all that said. the pool can choose the amount of data to include to ensure the data is not going to cause delays in the fastest broadcast competition. we do not need devs playing politics forcing economics on users to force users to pay more when the network can self regulate.
different pools can choose their transactions and if a miner on a certain pool is only getting a few sats for their time due to having too many other miners on the same pool cutting into its reward share, they can move to a less competitive pool.


also when it comes to the cost/reward for miners. they can jump to different pools/coins if they dont get the results they like or temporarily move to altcoins of same hash algo if the market conversion rate of coin to fiat is on a dip. but its worth noting even if a block only has <4btc reward total($280k) its not actually a <$280k cost to break/harm/undo/reorganise a block or the chain.. miners costs are not per block. they are spread out over a ~2 year life cycle of the hardware. meaning ~105000 blocks so the actual security/cost to be malicious at 51% is
$280k * 105k * 51%=~$15b of hardware and electric on average in recent times.. and so if its going to cost $15b to accumulate the hardware and pay electric contracts to mine at these levels. they need to then want to be malicious to a point of getting ROI of more then $15b to break even/profit

most transactions are not worth $15b and even if they re-orged a block to empty block each block for 2 years. unless they owned all utxo's of all them blocks to undo their confirmations or mess around.. they wont break even. so its not worth breaking bitcoin.. even if the per block cost is only $280k of security

[Wind_FURY]

This is a well thought out thread in my opinion.

Here's the summary:

"
BTC's longterm security depends on people paying extremely high TX fees which won't happen in a free market.
"

Is there a gaping hole in this argument?

https://x.com/Justin_Bons/status/1810357305390616839

That depends on if Bitcoin will be used more than what it was intended to be. We've already seen what meta-protocols can do to increase demand for block space. Plus Ethereum has high on-chain fees and that never stopped their users from paying them to buy a dick pic or to mint one.

[stompix]

I wonder how much exactly the miners spend to mine Bitcoin and verifying the transactions, then how much they actually earn from that, so we can get better illustration what he said is true or not.

It's pretty simple:
1) Go here and find out the price of a miner as well as its hashrate and consumption:
https://shop.bitmain.com/?coin=BTC%2FBCH%2FBSV
2) Current income is 4.8 cents per th/s
https://www.viabtc.com/tools/calculator

Do the math on your power cost and how much you would earn! What would be easier? 

Assuming that in future, Bitcoin continues its adoption and price growth, with higher price of Bitcoin, transaction fee will become higher with same fee rate.

So tell me, just because 100 more people use Visa than let's say American Express, you're going to pay 100 more in fees for that card instead of an AE one? Also if Nvidia shares went up 10x and Mirsoft only 2x, would you pay your broker 5 times the fees when you sell $1000 them? 

When BTC reaches 1million , you're going to be ok with paying a $1000 fee to order a $20 pizza? 
Just because the price of BTC has increased?

[bitterguy28]

What's an extremely high fee? What's high for you may be low for someone else.

that’s true. the transaction fee is proportional to how much you are going to be sending but if you are sending such a huge amount, it might seem like a few dollars might be worth it just to send out that specific transaction. meanwhile if you are only sending relatively a small amount then you might regret that few dollars off for a transaction fee

You can still send a $2 tx if you want and it will go through.

the problem is that it will not go through right away which could cause the problem because it might be a transaction that is needed to be done by the moment this is why many do not use bitcoin for daily transactions for this specific reason

[el kaka22]

"Extremely high fee" is not what we have even right now, let alone in the future when we may even find a solution. Yes, it could do that now, if everyone started to move their money, there is nothing stopping it, but why not consider something like LN may eventually get to working, and we may do better. Look at the past ,we had legacy, and then we moved to segwit and now we are paying less, it has happened before and it may happen again, why not?

This is why I think security question here is not fee structure, that can change, we just need to make sure that we know that future is not decided and known, so we have no idea how the future will be. Maybe it will be very high, maybe it won't be, we just need to make sure we are in bitcoin for the right reasons.

[d5000]

I wonder why there were so many threads open in these last weeks about that exact topic. It seems even somebody registered an account just for this mission. I think the discussion with most depth is in this thread, even if the title suggests it's about Ordinals/Runes.

I do not oppose ideas like an infinite tail emission like on XMR or Doge. But the problem is that a hard fork removing halvings e.g. from block 2xxxxxx on would drive away those Bitcoiners who firmly believe that the 21 million limit and the "deflationary nature" is the big USP. I think different, for me it's censorship resistance. But the "21 million guys" exodus would probably lead to a crash of epic dimensions, and probably also lead into another BCH-like fork, a "Bitcoin Classic" like ETC with the 21 million limit intact.

Let's see some of the options:

1) Big blocks without a tail emission would not solve the problem at all, because the miner income would actually fall, due to the less competitive fee market.

2) Big blocks with tail emission could work, but it has the problem I just wrote about - the abandoning of 21 million limit would lead to big turbulences. And there is the centralization problem if the block size limit is rised too much.

3) Tail emission without big blocks would retain decentralization, but obviously the "21 million guys exodus" danger is still there.

4) "Doing nothing" would probably gradually decrease the attack cost. There the X guy is correct. But the impact of halvings on miner income would be lower on each halving, even if the fee level stays constant at 5-20 sat/vByte.

5) Depending on higher prices like @pooya87 writes is imo not a sustainable strategy. Bitcoin should also work if it's priced lower than now.

6) There's also the hilarious idea to make Bitcoin blocks smaller to boost transaction fees. Apart from the hard-fork problem, this however would also make Lightning onboarding more expensive.

7) (this is my favourite strategy, as I wrote about in the other thread): explore merge-mined sidechains and rollups. Each sidechain can have an utility token which would be merge-mined with Bitcoin. Basically, this would be a kind of "off chain tail emission".

Another idea I wrote about (some years ago) that there could be synergies if miners work also as Lightning hubs and collect fees there too. This would of course make it necessary that Lightning is used a lot more than now, in the current state I believe no miner has really incentives to enter the LN fee market.