[coolKid721]

Lol total garbage people have been whining about the blocks regularly being EMPTY now, a huge % of transactions just occur off chain on exchanges/lightning/etc. There are no 100 dollar fees you can basically do everything for basically free. https://mempool.space/ look, you can see how many blocks aren't filled lol. This piece is literally just garbage. Big blockers are scam artists.

[FabHK]

The 100$ fee per transaction is what it would cost to sustain current miner revenue without mining reward (ie. mining revenue derived somewhat invisibly from money supply increase).

The piece is not garbage, but a thoughtful introduction to a problem that's approaching inexorably.

[greyface-]

> sustain current miner revenue

Why should this be the goal?

I'm sure miners would love to see their revenue never decrease, but this isn't a problem for users or for the security of the network. Block reward does not need to remain at or above current levels forever; it just needs to remain predictable from block to block. Difficulty adjustment works both up and down, even if we've only seen it go up so far. The 51% risk is overblown - the network is significantly overprotected right now, and we could stand to lose a few orders of magnitude without jeopardizing security/availability. Plus, it might even placate the energy consumption doomsayers.

As GP notes, empty blocks are now common, which is in fact a bigger risk in a low-subsidy environment. Maybe we should instead reduce minrelaytxfee to 0.1 sat/vB to incentivize full blocks.

[beeflet]

On the lightning network, fees are distributed to rent-seeking intermediaries instead of miners, yet the network is still dependent on the security from the miners. The lightning network is parasitic to bitcoin.

Blocks are empty because people decided that bitcoin was not a feasible means of transaction nearly a decade ago during the blocksize war.

[derangedHorse]

If you think peers on the Lightning network are “rent-seeking” intermediaries then you don’t understand what Lightning is. Peers allow us to circumvent the need for every counterparty to make a channel with one another and allow us to maintain privacy via onion routing. There’s no rent seeking here. Nodes pay fees to one another because these benefits come at the cost of liquidity for participating routing nodes.

[Tokumei-no-hito]

fair challenge to their proposed solution, but it doesn't negate the security premise does it? what do you think is a good alternative?

[coolKid721]

Nation states and large companies or individuals with significant stake in BTC running mining softwar thing seems obviously how it will inevitably end up. I don't really care what big blockers thing this isn't a "new thing" they've been running their mouths about this for a decade and every time they do something it ends up just being a way to push a scam where they control it and make money. Check the bcash/btc pair.

Profit driven mining companies are honestly kind of not a very good force and push for lots of weird scams to encourage mining like memecoins on BTC or "dog pictures", and also regularly mine just pump and dump alts (including the biggest BTC miners).

Mining should just be as distributed as possible and integrated into stranded power likely generating a small if any profit.