Bitcoin mining revenue will become entirely provided by transaction fees as block rewards rapidly fade away.
There isn't infinite demand for Bitcoin block space. Higher transaction fees push people to 2nd layers (Lightning), side chains (Liquid) or custodial exchanges, etc.
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BTC price went up far faster than block rewards went down, creating a massive amount of revenue for miners in the short term.
The price would have to double every 4 years simply to keep providing the same block reward revenue. Price would need to go up faster for it to increase.
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The economics of this don't support the kind of paperclip maximizer that it's portrayed to be at all. I think it's likely that the mining revenue stays about the same going forward i.e. price doubles about every ~4 years and people avoid paying orders of magnitudes more in fees.
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More cost efficient miners keep driving out the others, as always. If the cheapest power is subsidized coal (often the case now), they'll use that. If the cheapest approach is running your own power plants, they'll do that. If wind is cheaper than coal, they'll use wind power.
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That's the basic economics of it. Mining hardware gets massively more efficient too, so old mining ASICs lose relevance over time.
People won't pay 1000+ USD worth of BTC for each payment so clearly mass adoption would have to be via 2nd layers, side chains, etc. not on-chain.
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It could have mass adoption via a technology like Lightning but it would need to happen in a way not heavily depending on making lots of transactions. It would need to be a lot more efficient than it is now.
It clearly can't all be done on-chain, even if they made bigger blocks.
If they made the block size 100x higher, it would only provide 100x as much throughput, while destroying decentralization of validation by making it too hard to run a node. It wouldn't be anywhere close to making mass adoption via on-chain transactions possible. Doesn't scale.
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There has to be something like Lightning to make it scale. Something like that either works out or Bitcoin doesn't scale.
Clearly, every payment ever made being stored on every node is not something that scales up to handling most payments that people make. Needs higher layers.
