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Comment by paulgb | Hacker News Reader

I agree that it's absurd today, but how many bitcoin halvings until it isn't? When people talk about the security of bitcoin, there's a tendency to pretend that the network's security isn't 98% subsidized by a diminishing pool of unminted bitcoin.

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There are cryptocurrencies like monero that have implemented a constant "tail emission" block reward to fight off selfish mining attacks. So that leads me to believe that's a threat specific to bitcoin's tokenomics and not PoW cryptocurrencies in general.

Yes, if you don't bound the number of tokens it's not obviously doomed as time goes to infinity, but there's still no particular reason to assume that the rate of mining rewards is either good enough to secure the network or not massively inefficient.

Yeah, this is why I think bitcoin is long term not worthwhile. While the vision was a digital currency which would be widely used to transact with, it was plausible that transaction costs would be sufficient to secure the network (though it would still be difficult to actually price them effectively). But as a 'store of value', it will start to become either expensive or insecure as the mining rewards peter out.

The time to mine a block is "constant", in that it takes an average of 10 minutes whatever the network size.

When the mining rewards peter out, big ASIC farm miners leave the network, the mining difficulty goes down, and so does the energy and hardware investment required to mine a single block. But at the same time, smaller time miner can enter the network and mine with less powerful hardware.

If all miners were to quit tomorrow, the difficulty would go down so much that you could mine a block, in 10 minutes, with a Raspberry Pi Zero.

There are beliefs that as Bitcoin continues to accrue value and users, the fees will be enough to sustain the network. I understand many are skeptical in this regard and the only thing that will them right or wrong is time.

And with most common type of attack discussed the 51% double spend... You get to keep the fees... On all that happen during attack period transactions... Depending on situation on network you might not even lose anything if there isn't enough well paying transactions around.

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