Watching a guy eating a bag of Cheetos with chopsticks.

Not sure if he's a genius or retarded.

Sure, guillotines are gnarly, but the ancient Greeks were on a different level. Public execution varied from drinking of hemlock to throwing people off of cliffs.

The craziest, however, was the brazen bull. Offenders were put into hollowed out bronze bull statues. A fire was then laid underneath and they were scorched from the heating metal and suffocated with smoke.

Morning Coffee Bitcoin Report ☕️

Price: $25,600 (3,906 sats/dollar)

Hash Price: $61.41/PHash

Hash Rate: 393 EHash/s

Immediate Fee Rate: 17 sat/vByte

Hour Fee Rate: 16 sat/vByte

Block Interval: 10:00

Mempool Count: 93,395

Block Height: 807,187

Supply Issued: 92.77%

Blocks to Halving: 32,813

It’s amazing to me that the world is still obsessed with low fat diets. So many products cut out the natural fat, and what remains is just a sugar fest.

Fly on an long distant flight- constantly offered breads, juices, fat free yogurts, etc. Sugar bomb after sugar bomb. I usually fast on planes.

At a breakfast buffet right now. Eggs fried in seed oil. The butter packets are mixed with seed oil. Juices and fruits everywhere. Coffee machines whose only milk option is fat free skim milk. The main area is waffles and syrup. The child at the table next to me has a breakfast plate with chocolate-covered waffles, french fries, and juice- just layers of carbs and sugar. One has to dig into the corners of the room to find the meat and boiled eggs and such.

“We should change Bitcoin now in a contentious way to fix the security budget” is basically the same tinkering mentality that central bankers have.

It begins with an overconfident assumption that they know fees won’t be sufficient in the future and that a certain “fix” is going to generate more fees. But some “fixes” could even backfire and create less fees, or introduce bugs, or damage the incentive structure.

The Bitcoin fee market a couple decades out will primarily be a function of adoption or lack thereof. In a world of eight billion people, only a couple hundred million can do an on chain transaction per year, or a bit more with maximal batching. The number of people who could do a monthly transaction is 1/12th of that number. In order to be concerned that bitcoin fees will be too low to prevent censorship in the future, we have to start with the assumption that not many people use bitcoin decades out.

Fedwire has about 100x the gross volume that Bitcoin currently does, with a similar number of transactions. What will Bitcoin’s fee market be if volumes go up 5x or 10x, let alone 50x or 100x? Who wants to raise their hand with a confident model of what bitcoin volumes will be in 2040?

What will someone pay to send a ten million dollar equivalent on chain settlement internationally? $100 in fees per million dollar settlement transaction would be .01%. $300 to get it in a quicker block would be 0.03%. That type of environment can generate tens of billions of dollars of fees annually. The fees that people pay to ship millions of dollars of gold long distances, or to perform a real estate transaction worth millions of dollars, are extremely high. Even if bitcoin is a fraction of that, it would be high by today’s standards. And in a world of billions of people, if nobody wants to pay $100 to send a million dollar settlement bearer asset transaction, then that’s a world where not many people use bitcoin period.

In some months the “security budget” concern trends. In other months, the “fees will be so high that only rich people can transact on chain” concern trends. These are so wildly contradictory and the fact that both are common concerns shows how little we know about the long term future.

I don’t think the fee market can be fixed by gimmicks. Either the network is desirable to use in a couple decades or it’s not. If 3 or 4 decades into bitcoin’s life it can’t generate significant settlement volumes, and gets easily censored due to low fees, then it’s just not a very desirable network at that point for one reason or another.

Some soft forks like covenants can be thoughtfully considered for scaling and fee density, and it’s good for smart developers to always be thinking about low risk improvements to the network that the node network and miners might have a high consensus positive view toward over time. But trying to rush VC-backed softforks, and using security budget FUD to push them, is pretty disingenuous imo.

Anyway, good morning.

weird my zaps don't show - seems to be hit or miss