Author: Kate Salazar 2022-06-19 18:26:21
Published on: 2022-06-19T18:26:21+00:00
In an email sent to Bitcoin-dev, Manuel Costa shared his opinion that discussions about potential doom-like scenarios in the world of Bitcoin are somewhat irrelevant in practice. He believes that if and when issues arise with block rewards being too low to maintain acceptable security, there will be multiple solutions implemented, including a hard fork to indefinitely maintain some degree of block subsidy. If the original chain is confirmed to be insecure, consensus should eventually coalesce in one of the hard forks that can keep moving forward with some degree of security assurance. Costa points out that even if a system fails, the history is not lost, and we can move forward from that history with multiple alternatives and allow social/economic consensus to dictate which one becomes the new accepted chain. The only type of problems we should truly be worrying about are ones that might invalidate the security of the history itself, like a cryptographic breakthrough (quantum computing for example) that would turn some or all utxos into "anyone can spend".However, Peter Todd disagrees and argues that it doesn't make sense for the entire cost of PoW security to be paid for on a per-tx basis. Todd believes that the PoW security of Bitcoin benefits all Bitcoin users, proportional to the value of BTC they hold; if Bitcoin blocks aren't reliably created the value of all BTC goes down. While he acknowledges that it would be extremely unfortunate if one of the very few decentralized ways to store value died simply because we couldn't find a way to pay to keep it secure, he does not believe that users paying 100x fees for opening and closing LN channels is a sustainable solution.
Updated on: 2023-06-15T21:21:51.461981+00:00