Author: Billy Tetrud 2022-08-18 15:44:11
Published on: 2022-08-18T15:44:11+00:00
The concept of tail emission in Bitcoin does not solve the potential problem of mining rewards, it only delays it. A tail emission of 200,000 BTC per year would be equivalent to halvings every 50 years rather than every 4 years. While tail emission converges to a stable point and no inflation implies monetary deflation at the rate of loss, this is unlikely to be a significant problem. The loss rate is likely to decrease as methods of storing Bitcoin mature. If we want to solve the potential problem of not-enough-fees to upkeep mining security, there are less temporary ways to solve that, such as adding emission based on a constant fraction of fees in the block. Blockchain security (which mining revenue correlates with) does not need to increase indefinitely. There is some amount of security (and therefore some amount of mining revenue) that is sufficient, beyond which additional security is unnecessary, unwarranted, and wasteful. Without having some kind of estimates of what "enough security" is, there's absolutely no way of evaluating whether or not it's likely that Bitcoin fees alone will be able to sustain enough security.In the email thread, Jaroslaw argues that large stakeholders will not be incentivized to mine and that Bitcoin would fail miserably if Satoshi based his concept mainly on existence of idealists. Superiority of Proof of Work against Proof of Stake has been discussed enough, and swapping PoW to PoS would be a degradation. If fees are not sufficient, clearance times increase and large stakeholders are incentivized to mine. In the best case, fees are sufficient. In the worst case, it degrades to proof of stake.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T22:28:45.998460+00:00