Author: alicexbt 2022-07-10 14:17:36
Published on: 2022-07-10T14:17:36+00:00
In an email sent to the bitcoin-dev mailing list, ZmnSCPxj discussed the impact of perpetual issuance on censorship resistance in blockchain. He argued that block subsidy is a market distortion which erodes the value of held coins to pay for the security of coins being moved. If a miner censors particular transactions, they lose out on the fees of those transactions, but the loss is small relative to the total earnings of each block if there is a block subsidy. However, if the blockchain has 0 block subsidy, the loss incurred by the censoring miner is large relative to the total earnings of each block. Therefore, there is no incentive, considering only the block subsidy, to not censor coin movements. In such a situation, external benefits gained from censorship have to be proportionately larger than in the first situation.Therefore, preparing for a future where the block subsidy must be removed is essential in case a majority coalition of miners ever decides to censor particular transactions without community consensus. Fortunately, forcing the block subsidy to 0 is a soft fork and thus easier to deploy. The `consensus.nSubsidyHalvingInterval` for mainnet in chainparams.cpp can be decreased to 195000 to reduce the number of halvings from 34 to 14, and the subsidy will be 0 when it becomes less than 0.01 although it is not sure if this will be a soft fork. However, ZmnSCPxj doubts there will be consensus for this change as all the projections and predictability about Bitcoin currency would be affected by the change. Maybe everyone can agree with this change if most of the miners start being 'compliant' like one of the coinjoin implementation.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T22:34:17.918077+00:00