Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Security problems with relying on transaction fees for security

From: John Tromp <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2022 11:43:57 +0200

> The emission curve lasts over 100 years because Bitcoin success state requires it to be entrenched globally.

It effectively doesn't. The last 100 years from 2040-2140 only emits a
pittance of about 0.4 of all bitcoin.

What matters for proper distribution is the shape of the emission
curve. If you emit 99% in the first year and 1% in the next 100 years,
your emission "lasts" over 100 years, and you achieve a super low
supply inflation rate immediately after 1 year, but it's obviously a
terrible form of distribution.

This is easy to quantify as the expected time of emission which would
be 0.99 * 0.5yr + 0.01* 51yr = 2 years.
Bitcoin is not much better in that the expected time of emission of an
bitcoin satisfies x = 0.5*2yr + 0.5*(4+x) and thus equals 6 years.

Monero appears much better since its tail emission yields an infinite
expected time of emission, but if we avoid infinities by looking at
just the soft total emission [1], which is all that is emitted before
a 1% yearly inflation, then Monero is seen to actually be a lot worse
than Bitcoin, due to emitting over 40% in its first year and halving
the reward much faster. Ethereum is much worse still with its huge
premine and PoS coins like Algorand are scraping the bottom with their
expected emission time of 0.

There's only one coin whose expected (soft) emission time is larger
than bitcoin's, and it's about an order of magnitude larger, at 50
years.

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-supply-1169a188d153