No, he doesn't actually think that.

Lol

Call it 2500 transactions per block. It's actually less than that. How many gallons are miners burning every block? Divide that by transactions and you get gallons per transaction. It's not how much you paid for your tx fee. Miners get block rewards that comp them much more than tx fees.

Bitcoin miners burn electricity at a rate that has ~nothing to do with how many transactions there are, and that will continue to be true until transactions get really expensive. Some people like to divide the total amount of power used by the number of transactions to make individual transactions seem extremely wasteful.

A better analogy would be storing your gold guarded by a flaming ring of gasoline that costs you 4% a year to keep the flame going. Except it's more like an electric fence cuz no gasoline is actually burned.

yeah, i've been been saying this for years. he's the cryptocuck of bfi.

Not exactly the takeaway, but well done.

lot of truth from StinkyPete. I worked as a real-time power trader on two desks and a big part of my time was spent trying to quickly push physical power away from the midwest off-peak (10pm - 6 am).

tldr...It is very financially beneficial for some power plants to be able to run all day (even at a loss at night) BUT they cannot run if there's not enough energy consumption going on (think windy mild nights). So until we figure out how to store renewable generation the integrity of our grid / utility companies ACTUALLY need energy guzzlers ....ESPECIALLY ones that commit to set amounts of energy consumption on reliable time periods.

Bitcoin makes energy arbitrage possible. Denying this is just stupid, at this point it's a well known fact.

Store of energy value as it's been all along

Bitcoin actually saving the environment is a twist I didn't see coming.

Love it when clueless people try to argue. Miners depend on the block reward. Your transaction fee is almost irrelevant compared to the value of the block reward and it is the value of the block reward that causes mining to use a.lot more electricity than is required to keep the blockchain secure. Eventually this will change and so far nobody knows if transaction fees will be enough to keep mining going when the block reward is worth almost nothing.

There will be so much transactions occuring by then that fees will greatly outweigh block reward and so mining incentives will still be there (think sidechains, LN channels settling onto main chain, and traditional BTC activity on main chain).

That was satoshi's goal from the start

The uncertainty about future security is actually one of the only legit concerns nocoiners could use as an argument.

Though it is somewhat pointless speculating about it, because it's impossible to predict.

There are so many twists you won't see coming.

https://medium.com/@BrandonQuittem/b...3-6ec58cdcfaa6

Beautiful comparison of Bitcoin to fungi and the antifragile nature of them both.

That is a vert optimistic view when there currently is a hard limit of the number of transactions in a block and there is no way transaction fees will match the block reward we saw when bitcoin hit 10k+

why would that be a relevant benchmark?

Because he claimed transactions fees would be high enough even though it is obvious they wont get close to the block rewards.

Block rewards at that time were waaayyyy higher than necessary. Hash rates are now 4x higher than when btc first hit 10k. Even power usage according to estimates is higher today despite block rewards being a tiny fraction of what they were. So I don't see it as a relevant benchmark.

I don't disagree that it could be an issue though. There's no guarantee transaction fees will be sufficient to secure the network after a few more halvings. A hard fork might be needed to fix that. I've always thought that was a design oversight and that asymptotically approaching a fixed inflation rate on the order of 1% would have made more sense.

Bitcoin to 200K!

I thank your slow pony for the effort.

Does your pony know whether blocks will still be mined if I chose not to make transactions?

I agree that at this point we're overpaying for security. There are no serious threaths (read: governments) able to attack Bitcoin atm. There are simply not enough ASICs available to perform such an attack. In that way the inflation schedule might have leaned a bit too much on bootstrapping the network, instead of postponing some of these rewards to protect the network later on (for example in 2030).

With that said, there's only so much governments can do. If they attack Bitcoin, they can basically only censor transactions. They might mine empty blocks, or they will just censor specific transactions. In both of these cases the importance of the fee market will show. If your transaction is being censored by a government, you just increase the fee until it is +EV for other miners to mine your transaction again.

Keep in mind that the government will waste enormous amounts of resources trying to censor Bitcoin (buying enough ASICS and energy expenditure costs). Also governments tend to be highly inefficient at everything they do, so that will add to the costs too. They might even be too incompetent to get a 51% attack done. Private mining companies are extremely efficient and they are incentivized to fight back to not let their CAPEX go to waste.