I would actually like to see the fees higher. Gives me confidence that the miners will stay in the game when block rewards are slashed further and further.
If all transactions only occur on 2nd layer or on exchanges, how will they earn and keep hashrate high enough to secure the network?
the price of bitcoin goes up.
and it’s a free market with innovation. better miners, cheaper energy… I’m sure they will not starve.
Goldbug and anti-bitcoiner Peter Schiff just gave up.
Haha for real?
I remember him to be so anti BTC without valid points in the discussion with raoul paul
I think the post is sarcastic
You see here that fees are still a small % compared to the block reward
https://charts.bitbo.io/fees-percent-of-reward/
And as another user said with the price going up so does the reward. If price goes down, some miners will leave but the difficulty also goes down so it’s always in an equilibrium (this is coded in the protocol to keep a block at roughly every 10min). If price collapses (like, really collapses), difficulty will also collapse and it will become easier to “hack” the protocol, but by that point there’s isn’t much value to be lost anyway.
Also the Bitcoin network is orders of magnitude more secure than it needs to be. In fact you can argue that security is just a byproduct of mining and not the other way around. The main goal of mining is exactly in the name, it’s a mathematically designed way to release new bitcoin into the network to maximize decentralization. If everything had been mined then early adopters would make bank (even more than they already do) and the reputation of the protocol would be in shambles. This is what a lot of shitcoins do, and a big red flag.
I get the mechanism and i think its genius.
What i dont understand is the hard figures on that…
Lets imagine for example the block reward would disappear today, the transaction volume remains on the same level as today and we want to keep the hasrate at least on this level. Where would the bitcoin price need to be so that miners earn the same dollar amount?
I look at the last block with 3.35 fees+reward for the miner. 0.225 were fees only or about 6.7%.
I scale this with the “old” price or approx 60k.
Works out to about 900k.
This means that we need to reach at least a bitcoin price of 900k (in real terms) once the block rewards disappeared in 2140.
Does the calc make sense?
I guess the price seems within reasonable possibility.
But why do you “want” to keep the hashrate on this level?
I guess if you argue this on a mathematical POV, then yes, to keep the hashrate on this level BTC would need to be 900k (assuming your math is right). a 10x in 120years is extremely conservative so it seems like a feasible number. However that assumes that mining efficiencies stay the same which in fact is very much not true so the real hashrate will be multiples of that and difficulty will be scaled up to match.
However difficulty/hashrate basically cancel each other out. In the end, the cost to mine a block will be approximately “almost” the same as the reward from it, i.e. cost of mining a block = reward - a very small amount.
That is to say that you should just look at value in to get the answer you want. The network isn't safe because it has an hashrate of X, the network is safe because of the cost of achieving that hash rate.
Another example: If tomorrow someone discovers a new hashing algorithm that is twice as efficient. hash rate will immediately double, but then so will difficulty. block reward/fees will stay the same, and miner profitability as well.
But even then, coming back into the real world, you can now revert a bitcoin block/transaction, and the cost is ~300K USD. The most common example of why you should do such an attack is to double spend (i.e. you make a payment, get the goods, and then revert the chain, and revert the payment). Nobody in their right mind is closing a deal for hundreds of thousands of dollars with 1 confirmation block. Just go take a coffee, wait 10mins and there’s another one.
Going back to my original point and conclusion. The current hashrate is probably much higher than it needs to be. so if it drops for some reason it’s not the end of the world
FT bullish
I know I’m going to get a few of counter comments here, but I found the following video really interesting. And I think it has a kernel of truth.
Ahhh… just sold all my btc.
I think this video has some true comments.
But I would NOT conclude that Bitcoin is a ponzi scheme because in a Ponzi scheme money from others is used to pay returns. In BTC there is no returns promised
I see BTC as a stock of a company. Some call it undervalued. Some call it overvalued.
In fact holding a BTC actually means holding a share in the BTC network which has been built over years using thousands for computers.
Now ideally a value of a stock should be defined by cash flows. But in Bitcoin case there is no cash flow. So the value is simply based on speculation that in future there would be some use.
And then of course there is a “beauty lies in eyes of beholder” concept where it doesn’t matter what something is as long as people want it. Hermes Bag, Art, Gold etc.
But these are not scams. These are typical behaviours that exist in our society.
The only scam “potentially” that could be happening is collusion amongst traders to manipulate prices. There has been a paper about this.
This is the forum where we discuss how to save 0.001% credit card fees and miss 1000% gains. 
To be fair, in this forum most people are of opinion that gains of 1000% actually are not possible and to achieve market returns one need to be in full market.
In fact I think the there are only two threads on this forum which are about active investing at all
isn’t it more like: a fiat currency’s value is ultimately derived from the fact that you have to pay your taxes in it; Bitcoin ultimately gets its value from the fact that you have to pay transaction fees in it
I am not knowledgable enough to discuss Fiat versus BTC.
But we know that Fiat cannot hold its value forever . Its main purpose is to support economic activity and act as medium of transaction.
For example if you offer a service or goods which has equivalent value in my mind to a service what I might offer , then we can either just do a swap or we can just convert the service into a contract of 100 CHF which eventually could be used to buy similar valued good or services.
