As the price of btc rises, typically so to does hash rate to protect the network and be awarded the newly minted coins. But there seems to be a massive problem, as the newly minted bitcoin rate drops to eventually zero, what things will happen to maintain the healthy hash rate to protect the network while maintaining a usable fee rate? Even just going by today's rate of 12.5 btc block reward and average of 3500 tx per block leaves the average tx cost at 40-45usd with the reward removed.In the future, I imagine if btc was to ever reach the fabled $1Million per coin, this relative fee to protect against network attacks would likely need to be far greater than $40 to pay for the needed hashrate.Enter "lightning network", the thing that will solve bitcoins problems... but does it actually? Lets say bitcoins 21 million coins have been mined and they are worth 1 million each, and the average cost to transact on the chain is in the hundreds. People will almost certainly end up needing to stay permanently in the LN in systems not to different to what we already have today with banks. This is the go to solution for maximalists wanting to palm wave away the issues. But if everyone is using the LN, who is paying to secure the main chain hashrate? Do you really think there is going to be corporates ect paying insane fees to have the privilege to transact on the mainchain? The cost of power alone to protect a 1 million dollar bitcoin would be in the hundreds of billions of dollars a year (currently 3-4 billion annually at only 10~14k per coin).If there's one things corporates love, its cutting costs. We are entering a new era of cryptocurrencies where some projects are questioning whether we even need miners at all! So given projects without miners start to prove themselves, I don't see a realistic long term outcome for coins that need expensive and dictative miner networks, aka "middlemen".So what real steps have been discussed that solves these economic concerns in the bitcoin network? I bring this up as I am worried that once/if bitcoin becomes this global reserve and countries put their economic weight into btc mining they will have the majority rule on the hashrate and start enforcing things that go against what bitcoin is supposed to be.With no one willing to pay the hash rate costs, my main fear is that a couple decades down the road it might suddenly start sounding like a "good idea" to uncap the bitcoin supply and let the block rewards flow into the pockets of these massive mining farms. At that point we might as well start calling them the fed. Before you start hand waving this off as "never gunna happen", consider the fact that this already has happened before with gold. People in general are lazy and don't seem to have enough time outside of keeping up with the kardashians to be concerned with peering behind the wizards curtain to see what is really going on. %99 of people have no idea how the money system today works, that same %99 of people will likely never know how btc works either. Before you start going all tribal on me for questioning the larger logistics of how bitcoin is supposed to work long term. Please consider this discussion for the betterment of humanity than the betterment of what ever your favorite bags are.
Submitted August 07, 2019 at 06:26AM
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