Bitcoin depends on tx fees to incentivize miners.
any ideas about how they will be compensated in the future?
Discussion
Yes. Demand for block space will increase organically as all 8 billion people on earth are onboarded and will want to at least control a few utxo's over their lifetime
Yep, and if the demand wanes for a while, miners that can't afford to stay in business will die off, leaving more competitive miners in their place. It's always gonna be there.
all evidence to the contrary.
you literally just said people were using LN instead.
and >90% of people don't self custody anyway.
so thats hopium and not predicated on any actual real world usage.
You don't use ln instead of on chain, you use it in addition to onchain because you need 2 transactions to open and then close channels. Idk how many more transactions are taking place on lightning, but I've already zapped or been zapped like 20 times today, when I was averaging 1 transaction per week in 2016 when the blocks were full.
Difficulty will drop, it'll be lucrative once again to mine and we off go again.
The beauty is in its unstructured simplicity.
I think what you mean is
if theres no demand for block space,
the miner's margin become razor thin
and only the MOST competitive miners can afford to stay in business
which means the net amount of energy protecting the network *decreases