This was Hashcash created by Adam Back and referenced in the Bitcoin Whitepaper and was a primary influence in the creation of the Proof-of-work system combined with a difficulty adjustment Satoshi invented, solving the Byzantine General problem. Worth understanding at a basic level if you're into this space as the idea is fundamental to how all this works.
Hashcash - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
I'd like to see some kind of solution where instead of Google or Apple selling your digital information for a few cents, suddenly people are selling their own information as needed to fund their own "free internet" use. Solves two problems.
This was actually part of Andrew Yang's platform when he was running for President during Democratic Primary pre-2020. Its something I agree about to this day, people should own their data and be allowed to sell it if they choose to do so and the proceeds should go to them. How would that look practically and what are the ramifications? I don't know tbh.
It would honestly look no different than it does today.
Another problem I see with as much as everybody is clamoring over the CLARITY act and other Crypto legislation is that the promise of Crypto and DeFi was to give a financial system not in the complete capture and control of the "Big Bank World".
I mined a lot in 2016-2019, and the way it worked then was when mining was profitable, tons of people bought equipment and started mining, hashrate goes up, difficulty goes up, profit goes down. BTC crashes or people stop mining because it's not profitable, profits go back up, it sucks more people into mining, etc etc.
If mining becomes unprofitable less people mine, difficulty adjusts down, and the issue resolved itself. There is obviously a price point where this becomes untenable but you can look at hashrate and see we're nowhere close to this. BTC is so much more robust than you're giving it credit for here.
The problem is that the influences behind computing growth and efficiency have mostly drained up, which leaves price point a much bigger factor in consensus than it was intended to be originally. At some point with factors as they are, bitcoin will reach the danger zone of failing to maintain the necessary security.
Price only effects miner efficiency in this context, not consensus. The danger, to the degree it exists, is that the mining reward would fail to incentivise enough hash to secure the chain, leaving it vulnerable to a 51% attack which would allow double spends or to otherwise reverse transactions and control block space.
You don’t seem to understand that btc is a living ledger and that hash rate is effectively its security. I won’t disagree with flobees assessment that this will take a long time to realize, but he’s also right to agree with me that the hash rate inversion is and should be concerning. Were decades off from an attack likely being possible, but if people see the possibility of it becoming inevitable money will flee aggressively before that happens.
With current block space that would essentially kill mining because the financial incentives disappear. In that scenario you either need actors not motivated by profit mining (think governments if BTC were a concern for national security for example), you need block space to be consistently full so the fees are sufficient to incentivise mining, or you need the value of BTC to be so high that what fees are in a block are sufficient incentive.
They will increase the transaction fees to protect the network when mining rewards disappear. Whether this causes the network to implode or not remains to be seen.
Because if there was a block reward forever then there wouldn't be a supply cap. The idea is that the transact fees should be high enough by that point where block rewards won't be needed, or as I stated earlier actors with other incentives do the mining.
Yea, sometime around 2140, mining rewards would disappear.
