On Mon, Jul 11, 2022 at 2:19 PM Bram Cohen via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > If transaction fees came in at an even rate over time all at the exact > same level then they work fine for security, acting similarly to fixed > block rewards. Unfortunately that isn't how it works in the real world. > There's a very well established day/night cycle with fees going to zero > overnight and even longer gaps on weekends and holidays. If in the future > Bitcoin is entirely dependent on fees for security (scheduled very > strongly) and this pattern keeps up (overwhelmingly likely) then this is > going to become a serious problem. > > What's likely to happen is that at first there will simply be no or very > few blocks mined overnight. There are likely to be some, as miners at first > turn off their mining rigs completely overnight then adopt the more > sophisticated strategy of waiting until there are enough fees in the > mempool to warrant attempting to make a block and only then doing it. > Unfortunately the gaming doesn't end there. Eventually the miners with > lower costs of operation will figure out that they can collectively reorg > the last hour (or some time period) of the day overnight and this will be > profitable. That's likely to cause the miners with more expensive > operations to stop attempting mining the last hour of the day preemptively. > > What happens after that I'm not sure. > Miners will learn to create anyone-can-spend outputs to bribe other miners to build on their block rather than reorg it. (Due to the coinbase maturity, this will require some amount of floating capital.)