[skybrian]

> mining reward is tending to zero by design

The schedule matters. It’s good that the block reward will be cut in half soon, but why do we have to wait four years for it to happen again? There’s no particular reason to believe that Nakamoto would choose to spend 10x Google on electricity if they were choosing a schedule today.

The schedule stays the way it is because miners like money and changing the consensus is hard, not because it’s a good idea.

And so, the only way to drop electricity spending is to make the price crash. The much easier option of changing a parameter in the software is eliminated because of the impossibility of getting a consensus to do it.

This is what happens when you remove centralized decision making.

[gruez]

>This is what happens when you remove centralized decision making.

Is this really a bad thing? ie. a system where you need consensus from all stakeholders for a change to go through, as opposed to something like the fed where they can unilaterally print trillions of dollars?

[zepto]

Sure it’s really a bad thing - a network that consumes exponentially increasing resources but cannot change because the incentives for individual actors is to keep playing the same game is just a tragedy of the commons and nothing more.

Dislike of the ‘fed’ had no bearing on this.

[skybrian]

It’s not “all stakeholders” when only miners get to vote and (barring extraordinary consensus-making) there is only one way to vote.

[gruez]

>(barring extraordinary consensus-making)

But changing the block reward schedule is "extraordinary consensus-making"?

[skybrian]

Yes, because the way they set it up, it will never happen. Miners would have to vote for their own revenue to drop faster.

If people holding Bitcoin got to vote then maybe they wouldn’t choose to give miners $1.5 billion a month in rewards?

[gruez]

> Yes, because the way they set it up, it will never happen. Miners would have to vote for their own revenue to drop faster.

Miners follow the users, not the other way around. We saw this with the failed segwit2x fork, which had 80% miner support but still failed.

>If people holding Bitcoin got to vote then maybe they wouldn’t choose to give miners $1.5 billion a month in rewards?

Maybe because they think a 1.75% inflation rate is worth it to secure the network?

[skybrian]

Well, they called it off. Who knows what would have happened?

Sure, when the market goes up a lot, maybe a 1.75% fee doesn't seem so bad. It's still 10x Google's electricity usage for a simple consensus algorithm.