logoalt Hacker News

mrbtoday at 8:16 AM2 repliesview on HN

"Bitcoin's security inevitably weakens over the coming years due to diminishing miner rewards (denominated in BTC)"

That's incorrect. Security scales with USD-denominated rewards, not BTC-denominated. And there are 16 years of real-world data showing they have been generally increasing, so a healthy sign that the Bitcoin experiment is working:

https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/block-reward-per-block

And not only that, but rewards are still expected to stabilize even when measured in BTC (thereby not relying on an increase of BTC's price) as they are progressively composed more and more of tx fees instead of newly mined BTC.

It's puzzling to me why some still don't understand the systemic incentives that make all this work as it has for 16 years and counting...


Replies

officialchickentoday at 9:06 AM

> It's puzzling to me why some still don't understand the systemic incentives...

Then I guess you're the type who will be really surprised to learn that with diminishing rewards comes increasing consolidation.

> ... that make all this work as it has for 16 years and counting...

That's convenient way to memory hole the market flash crashes, network forks, the blocks mined without consensus, and everything bad that happened over that timeframe.

free_biptoday at 8:29 AM

How are you so confident that it will never weaken? Especially since there will come a time when the block reward is literally 0.

show 1 reply