Author: Eric Voskuil 2022-07-10 17:42:59
Published on: 2022-07-10T17:42:59+00:00
ZmnSCPxj, a developer, raised concerns about the impact of perpetual issuance on censorship resistance in Bitcoin. He explained that the block subsidy is a market distortion and erodes the value of held coins to pay for the security of coins being moved. However, the subsidy is still issued whether or not coins being moved are censored or not censored, which means there is no incentive to not censor coin movements. To address this issue, ZmnSCPxj suggested preparing for a future where the block subsidy must be removed, possibly before the existing schedule removes it, in case a majority coalition of miner ever decides to censor particular transactions without community consensus. Fortunately, he said that forcing the block subsidy to 0 is a soft fork and thus easier to deploy. A contributor named alicexbt replied and suggested decreasing `consensus.nSubsidyHalvingInterval` for mainnet in `chainparams.cpp` to reduce the number of halvings from 34 to 14 and make the subsidy 0 when it becomes less than 0.01. However, he doubted that there would be consensus for this change since all the projections and predictability about Bitcoin would be affected by it.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T22:27:29.868129+00:00