I am saying they're less incentivized, and the clock is ticking, if this is the case in two more halvings we could be completely cooked
The increase can be explained mostly from asic efficiency improvements and kyc'd regulated miners using capital markets to speculate on hashrate
Bitcoin is 16 years old. Nobody has any idea what the mining market or the TX fee market will look like in two more halvings. Why the nonstop complaining about a problem that MIGHT materialize IF bitcoin survives to be 50% older than it is today? It's like worrying that your 8 year old won't pass their driver's license test. Completely nonsensical.
I don't believe empty mempools are a problem at all. I see plenty of existential problems for bitcoin, some I talk about publicly and some I don't. Onchain fee rates don't even register.
The block subsidy exists to give us a runway for organic growth. Everything appears to be going according to plan. Miners clearly do not need additional incentive to deploy hashrate. If fees were a significant source of revenue it would just get captured by the pool cartels and worsen the already catastrophic levels of block template producer centralization.
I sincerely believe you and everyone else are pulling in the wrong direction on this issue. I don't care about the social media posts because they accomplish nothing but I am increasingly frustrated at the sheer number of bitcoiners focusing on all the wrong things.
How do we make material progress on the many existential threats to bitcoin if people can't or won't even consider the actual problems we face?
There are more pertinent problems yes, but being aware of a longer term problem doesnāt mean youāre excluding or not focusing on short term problems.
The fact that thereās relatively little beyond speculative demand for Bitcoin 16 years in is pretty concerning when the network is literally hard coded to crush speculation without utility one day.
Yes you could say we are still early, and thereās many paths the market might take to solve this quickly. I generally believe this. I donāt quite understand the point about fees increasing miner centralization- but Iām open to being educated here.
For me, pointing out the lack of block space demand is a rallying cry that we need to use Bitcoin as money far more- and therefore drive demand for settlement from the bottom up. The more we do that, the more we decentralize purchasing power, the more we increase more peopleās time preference, the more freedom we distribute.
Empty blocks are a symptom of Bitcoin being hoarded by the already wealthy for some future power play, and that it is not actually being used and distributed. So itās understandable people are concerned about thisā¦ like your 8 year old kid getting in with the wrong crowd.
> I donāt quite understand the point about fees increasing miner centralization- but Iām open to being educated here.
The FPPS payout formulas exclude outlier blocks with the highest and lowest fees earned each epoch. They do this so miners don't take a hit from empty blocks, right? LOL right... They do it so they can keep all the fees from shitcoin token launches for themselves. It has been a VERY profitable formula for the pools.
https://pool-faq.foundrydigital.com/what-is-foundry-usa-pools-payout-methodology
> For me, pointing out the lack of block space demand is a rallying cry that we need to use Bitcoin as money far more- and therefore drive demand for settlement from the bottom up.
Can you explain to me the mechanism of action for this? This is what it looks like to me:
1. Complain about empty blocks on the internet
2. ?
3. Plebs make more on-chain transactions
What is step 2? How does that work exactly?
What's worse is that this position is internally inconsistent. The same folks complaining about empty block also fiercely advocate for self-custodial lightning which reduces on-chain fee rates. How do we expand access to self-custodial bitcoin while SIMULTANEOUSLY driving up fee rates and pricing people out of self custody?
Which is more important? Incentivizing hashrate deployment or incentivizing self-custody.
You can't have your cake and eat it too.
For people who donāt understand how the network works, yesā¦ this can be inconsistent.
But if you are driving economic activity through Bitcoin, no matter the layer, you eventually drive settlement demand because built up imbalances need to be settled for risk management.
That takes A LOT of economic activity to matter though. Which is why Iām actually open to innovation here (especially in the thermodynamic clock / timechain space as it pertains to Nostr), because I donāt think monetary purism will get us a robust system. People need to be more open about what is āBitcoin driven economic activityā outside of purely currency IMO. Thatās where this discussion can go off the rails though.
You ignore the risk that increased fees pose to self-custody. If it takes car money to get your transactions mined no one will self-custody.
Most individual people wonāt self custody (most already are not). Itās somewhat tragic, but denying that reality doesnāt steer towards practical solutions either.
So we need to build up systems where enough distributed entities have the āfuck youā power of self-custody / on chain movement. These distributed entities being incentivized to earn the capital of individual users is how we might realistically have a shot at more freedom at scale.
Merchants being a significant portion of these distributed entities seems like the right idea here instead of nation states IMO.
But I am talking my own book here. Home mining movement (particularly Datum) is also awesome, and another important piece of the balance.
Agreed, except I think you're missing a piece of the puzzle. Small pools will play a key role. Nobody seems to believe it's possible. Demand is apparent. All we need is good software. And someone to fund it... š
I am most bearish on the last point. I don't see anything that gives me hope.
What advantage/s do small pools have over larger ones?
You can trust the pool operator who shakes your hand. Not so with a large pool.
If you use ehash you can profit by selling your hashrate on the free market. You can also stack sats privately from anywhere in the world by buying ehash.
I believe there are even more amazing privacy tools in the coinbase. Imagine if every block included an untraceable and invisible coinjoin for 3.125 btc. Imagine you could earn a piece of those fees by pointing your water heater at a cypherpunk privacy pool.
The only way to defeat large pools is to out-compete them. They are non competitive on privacy. This is their weak point. Strike at the weak point. This is how we win.
Iāve really got to dig in on the emerging mining decentralization initiativesā¦ seems exciting. I see no reason why small pools couldnāt play a role.
> Most individual people wonāt self custody
I think you're wrong about this. We are technically capable of scaling onchain throughput to serve every human at reasonable fee rates.
If we fail to achieve this scale it will be due to a failure of social scaling. Wasted too much time on OP_RETURN and defeatist takes while the foxes raided the henhouse.
the fox is already in the henhouse btw
I hope I am wrong about it.
Technically youāre right. But my view of most people and their laziness / lack of technical aptitude is obviously a lot more cynical than yours lol!
Agreed the fox is already in. Thereās blood everywhere. Iām pivoting my energy towards another angle of power distribution that I believe is more realistic.
Maybe thatās defeatist. In the meantime Iāll also support the efforts of people who share your view, despite my cynicism (looking into this small pools thing and probably going to contribute hash). If Iām proven wrong, then thatās a good thing.
Wait... I thought the maximum number of yearly transactions is a couple hundred million. How would that meet throughput of everyone?
Increase throughput. There are many possible designs. Some soft forks, some hard forks. I like Lopp's goldiblocks proposal. James O'Bierne talks about $1000 self-sovereign nodes being a perfectly reasonable goal. 1MB blocks are not the answer. That was just a number Satoshi picked with no rationale. Why should we be stuck with it forever?
Lopp sent me this presentation too in another discussion but I donāt understand how this is a robust solution:
nostr:nevent1qqstrmtk0xtd5jymyln660jl032ejs9k5yrv059mkk42dsf6y65yevqp0t4hz
What do you think about on chain fee rate futures? Information from a market like that would be immensely valuable to both miners and merchants
Step 2 for most people is indeed ??? lol. For myself (and seemingly nostr:nprofile1qqsw9n8heusyq0el9f99tveg7r0rhcu9tznatuekxt764m78ymqu36cpr3mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujucnfw33k76twwpshy6ewvdhk6tcpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuat50phjummwv5hs3yu44r as well) it means build things that encourage using Bitcoin as money.
Realistically step 3 is drive settlement demand not plebs making onchain txesā¦ because lightning exists. Thatās a deep discussion on its own.
I really donāt see the problem. Fees are trending up. Purchasing power of sats are trending up.
Both of these long-term trends demonstrate that in a zero block reward environment there will still be plenty of purchasing power in hashing blocks from tx fees.
I think worry about this now is high time preference and alarmists.
