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Micah541
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Injeera bread with dinner

This is a massively under appreciated delicious healthy meal

“BuT FiRSt HanD AcCounT”.

Really? Tucker Carlson can fuck a hedge trimmer

Security budget

The problem with relying on the private jet class paying for proof of work is that the private jet class does not need or care about proof of work. nostr:note1l0d6skks5tj75vc9q7dznte6v9ftv4gcwpzn39qp2j49hkpawmcqksse0d

Replying to Avatar Lyn Alden

“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.

I have some objections to this analysis.

The "wildly contradictory" arguments that you point to are precisely the problem: Fees could be so high that only rich people can use L1 (plebs sure aren't going to spending $50 every transaction) while at the same time even these higher fees could represent a such a small fraction of total market cap that it doesn't keep things secure.

My understanding of the drivechain idea is that it's aiming to aggregate huge volumes of lows fees up to main chain. It's not clear that it would work exactly as planned, but it does represent a possible Goldilocks arrangements that doesn't fall back onto Saylor's silly "oh but rich people pay to transport art and pay real estate agents 3%" argument. I'm having trouble picturing high value investors needing to settle $10 million a few times a second.

Certainly, we're not relying on high value investors constantly making L1 transaction to keep Bitcoin running?

If Bitcoin where to obtain this sort of global store-of-value status such that trillions of dollars was changing hands every day, handling transactions off L1 would have become the norm. If I'm a rich folk settling $10 million in a single transaction, it's not the security of PoW that I'm most interested to pay for, it would be the handling of keys and this sort of thing that your average Walmart heiress isn't going to be confident with - so this will be handled by boutique Swiss bankers, who would devise their own ways to skimp paying the billions of on-chain fees.

The problem with putting the security assumption on high net worth investors is that they are the easiest to capture, they don't care about censorship resistance. If the blockchain is captured by a monopoly miner or a cabal of corporations, it need not cease to be a store of value, as long as these high net worth investors continue to believe it's a store of value.

Also, no need to pile on to this "VC-backed" ad hominem: Either it's a well-thought out idea (since 2015) or it's not

Elon musk has just discovered that free speech has this funny property that sometimes what other people say has effects on other people, now he’s mad so he does things like suppress views on Twitter that are critical and suing people off Twitter. He has an 8th grade understanding of free speech

Elon Musk is that seventh grade kid who’s been on a “free-speech“ grind ever since last week when he got detention for calling the fourth period teacher a “f—-t”

I hope there’s still that guy responding with “Why do you want to do it this way?” Instead of answering the damn question

Been hitting the email a lot lately and it’s great nostr:note1jg02vnxyh5jtnd0l72dyv2d0dcy360ethxaqjw5tepcftp69s56s5ac6pq