Subject: [bitcoindev] Re: HODL Tax Proposal

From: Garlo Nicon <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 2 Aug 2024 01:45:18 -0700 (PDT)

Good luck implementing it in test networks first, for example testnet3. 
Some people were complaining, that they cannot get enough coins, and there 
is no other test chain, which is close to the mainnet, and has a lot of 
history, and a lot of halvings. So, if you think seriously about it, then 
you should start from testnet3. Other networks, including mainnet, have not 
enough blocks, and have too big rewards for that.

> addresses that do not engage in any outgoing transactions for over 60 days

Miners can easily attack your network by mining empty blocks. It is 
profitable to block regular payments today, to get high demurrage fees 
tomorrow. Also, it is possible to easily censor any transaction, just by 
refusing to include it. Then, required demurrage fees will be higher, than 
what was originally sent as fees, and all nodes will just throw it away, 
while respecting your consensus. Which also means, that this proposal 
enables "transaction expiration" in some implicit way: if a transaction is 
not confirmed in N blocks, then everything is eaten by demurrage fees, so 
the old transaction simply expires.

> action needs to be taken before Peter Todd's suggestion of tail emissions 
get any serious momentum

Assuming that "tail supply" will ever be implemented, then guess what: 
people will count each and every overprinted satoshi. Creating coins is 
hard, burning them is easy. If people will inflate Bitcoin, then other 
people will bring it back to the equilibrium, just by burning all 
overprinted coins, and refusing to accept any overprinted satoshi. You will 
see charts, and statistics, how many "tail supply coins" were mined in a 
given block, and people will burn the same amount, if not more.

> A proposed rate is 0.1% of the address balance per inactivity period.

Ouch. This is way more than the current fees. Some people stopped using LN, 
because of fees like that. If you have 1 BTC, and you have to pay 100k 
satoshis, then you can compare it with on-chain fees, where you can get it 
confirmed for 1k sats. Which means, that this "0.1% fees" will remove all 
whales from your network, where "a whale" is "anyone with >= 0.01 BTC". 
Good luck maintaining the chain without any whales, it will be just an 
altcoin, similar to CPU-mined altcoins, where "miners=users" is the only 
use-case.

Also note, that miners can simply send those demurrage fees back to the 
users, just to get something. Then, they will have the choice: reject 
user's transaction entirely (because of missing demurrage fees), or confirm 
two transactions: one paying demurrage fees, and one sending them back to 
the user. Congratulations, your rule just doubled the number of 
transactions for no reason. Because only miners getting proper fees will 
survive, everyone else will reject too many transactions, and end up with 
nothing.

> The inactivity threshold and fee rate can be adjusted based on community 
feedback and network conditions.

So, is it a local node policy, instead of being a consensus rule? Good, 
then I can just edit my config file, put "demurragefee=0.00000000" and 
"inactivity=999999999". Good to know, that a proposal like that, can be 
turned off that simply.

czwartek, 1 sierpnia 2024 o 23:13:42 UTC+2 Richard Greaser napisał(a):

> Hi everyone, 
>
> It has become apparent to me that there is an issue where users of the 
> network holding their coins, are not adding value to the network. 
>
> As miners continue to get squeezed post halving, they would benefit 
> tremendously from fees being taken from individuals refusing to move their 
> coins, providing increased security to the network. 
>
> I have written out a proposal more in depth and is attached below. 
>

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