| An obvious argument against this: so far we haven't seen a problem at all with halvings. The network's hashrate continues to rise. BUT - that is only due to the increase in purchasing power of BTC. At the last halving in May 2020, BTC was trading at 8-9K, so at its current value of 28K "half" the BTC is still worth MORE. In real terms the block reward has gone up, not down. And so has the hashrate. A BTC maximalist might say that the price increases because of the halving and this will continue for all future halvings, making the real-world value of the block reward approximately consistent over the next few decades. I doubt it, because each halving should have less and less impact on the price. There are millions of BTC already mined and actively trading so is the price really going to double when we go from making 900 new ones per day to 450 new ones per day? And down the road, from 450 new ones to 225? And so on? Eventually the newly mined BTC are such a drop in the bucket compared to the already-mined ones being traded, that a reduction in emission cannot have much impact on price. I don't believe the theory that the halving was responsible for the last pump either. I think it's more the market conditions during the pandemic that encouraged speculation. But just for fun let's pretend that this does happen. The price doubles (give or take) after each halving to maintain the real world value of the block reward. In that case it could theoretically work all the way up until the very last halving takes the reward to 0. Because the fees people are willing to pay are still going to be on the level of "a piece of candy" for a transaction. Whatever that translates to in BTC. Scaling up the real-world value of BTC works for magnifying the block reward which is denominated in a fixed amount of BTC, but not for magnifying the fees which are just a bidding war and not fixed value. And really, it would fail a bit before then because long before the final halving, you already have ultra-low rewards denominated in Satoshi. You couldn't scale Bitcoin's real world value enough to make those one or two digit SAT rewards mean anything, without also making it totally unusable for ordinary transactions! |