Rough thoughts on how to scale bitcoin to billions of poeple:
https://delvingbitcoin.org/t/thoughts-on-scaling-and-consensus-changes-2023/32/4
I think your very first point is a non-sequitur.
> L1 is finite, which is the fundamental reason that it’s valuable.
The value fundamentally comes from the utility of the network, no? If the network is no longer useful, the bitcoins don’t keep their value inherently.
So prioritizing utility seems to be more important than prioritizing a hard supply cap.
But that, in turn, comes from the finite nature.
The coins are used to get transactions into the network.
If it was infinite, the coins would have no utility, and no value.
Sounds about right
Finite and infinite don’t really make sense in terms of supply. Better to talk about emission strategy rather than supply.
Hard cap vs soft cap (constant emission or tail emission)
Exactly.
Fixed emission > fixed supply for long term blockchain security.
Gold doesn't stop working or threaten it's security if people stopped mining it. Unlike Bitcoin.
Value is subjective. You would think a bitcoiner would know this. So it's weird for you to make such an objective statement as if it is fact.
Bitcoin controls the supply side of the equation. It can never control the capricious demand side.
Second, using "infinite vs finite" supply to define value is clearly not true. All resources in the universe are virtually limitless given more time, but still have value. We've been mining gold for thousands of years. Does gold have no value?
What is important is that the creation is not arbitrary and ideally predictable (unlike fiat). Using Monero's time hardcap as an example is 0.6 XMR every 2 minutes.
And I'm not even touching on the value of an L1 MoE that has real world fungibility and privacy combined with progressively cheaper transactions (without giving up core value props)...utility that bitcoin lacks.
On further thinking you do have a good point. You could have large blocks with a fee structure. But then all fees would be the minimum. So a finite block size is one of the things that gives bitcoin value because it allows you to prioritize transactions. I'll think about this more and how it could be rephrased.
