Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary

From: Peter <[email-masked]>
Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2022 22:21:05 +0000

>At present, all notable proof-of-work currencies reward miners with both a block reward, and transaction fees. With most currencies (including Bitcoin) phasing out block rewards over time. However in no currency have transaction fees consistently been more than 5% to 10% of the total mining reward[^fee-in-reward], with the exception of Ethereum, from June 2020 to Aug 2021. To date no proof-of-work currency has ever operated solely on transaction fees[^pow-tweet], and academic analysis has found that in this condition block generation is unstable.[^instability-without-block-reward] To paraphrase Andrew Poelstra, it's a scary phase change that no other coin has gone through.[^apoelstra-quote]

We should consider that a fixed block reward doesn't guarantee that the value of energy securing transactions is greater than the value being transacted in a practical amount of blocks where practical is a certain amount of time (currently 1 hour). If the energy expenditure is less than the value transacted in a given amount of blocks those transactions are at risk of being double spent. We have seen this failure with Ethereum Classic where any meaningful amount of value would need 2 weeks of blocks to be deeply confirmed for economic purposes.

We should also not assume that the Bitcoin emission curve implies there will be zero block rewards for mining Bitcoin, let me explain. There's an ugly solution that doesn't require a hard fork (I'm not advocating for this solution just presenting it) where a new coin is launched to merge mine with Bitcoin and that new coin (called BTail for discussion purposes) would enfranchise everyone who is a Bitcoin UTXO holder at the moment of the real-time launch of BTail at a well known block height. Using a technique we have seen with BCH to create an arguably fair launch. BTail would have a floating exchange rate to Bitcoin and its success or failure in terms of adoption would be determined by the market. It would require the same network effect barriers as a hard fork (opt-in) but would not put Bitcoin at risk while people can take time to install new software (and write new integrations) as they would with a soft fork.

Regards

Peter Kroll