I disagree on the risk of harm and potential for benefit.
The harm is the increased risk of deep re-orgs and miner centralization (which is incentivized).
I see no benefit in supposed security budget research. Either the current block subsidy schedule will be sufficient for security or it wonât. If not, then some inflationary hardfork will emerge and become what we call âBitcoinâ.
No research is required. This is a problem for many years from now, to be solved by market selection.
You could be right
I prefer checkpoints to an inflationary hard fork. The problem could be on us sooner than people think, though
I like that there's R&D in this area, though its something for everyone to think about. I hope we keep the good people that we have researching this.
> I prefer checkpoints to an inflationary hard fork.
I donât know what you mean by âcheckpointsâ.
One other option nobody ever mentions: increasing the block time. If the block time were to increase on a schedule like the halvening, then the block subsidy would never run out.
Increasing the block time can be achieved by a soft fork. Legacy nodes would simply see blocks coming in too slowly and continue to ratchet the difficulty level down, while upgraded nodes increased required difficulty per the increased block time.
Such a change would have the added benefit of eventually unlocking the possibility of mining elsewhere in the Solar system. The current 10-minute time is too short for Martian miners to reliably receive terrestrial blocks, for example.
