📅 Original date posted:2022-07-07 📝 Original message:On Thu, Jul 07, 2022 at 10:12:41AM -0400, Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev wrote: > We should not imbue real technology with magical qualities. That's much more fun if you invert it, and take it as a mission statement. Advance technology sufficiently! > The fact of the matter is that the present amount of security is about 1.7% of > the total coin supply/year, and Bitcoin seems to be working fine. 1.7% is also > already an amount low enough that it's much smaller than economic volatility. > > Obviously 0% is too small. > > There's zero reason to stress about finding an "optimal" amount. An amount low > enough to be easily affordable, but non-zero, is fine. 1% would be fine; 0.5% > would probably be fine; 0.1% would probably be fine. For comparison, 0.1% of 21M BTC per annum is 0.4 BTC per block, which is about 50sat/vb if blocks are 800kvB on average. Doing that purely with fees seems within the ballpark of feasibility to me. 50sat/vb for a 200vb tx (roughly the size of a 2-in, 2-out p2wpkh/p2tr tx) is $2 at $20k/BTC, $10 at $100k/BTC, $100 at $1M/BTC etc. If the current block reward of ~1.7% pa of 19M at a price of $20k funds the current level of mining activity, then you'd expect a similar level of mining activity as today with reward at 0.1% pa of 21M at a price of ~$310k. Going by the halving schedule, the block subsidy alone will remain above 0.1% of supply until we hit the 0.39 BTC/block regime, in 2036, at which point it drops to ~0.0986% annualised. (I guess you could extend that by four years if you're willing to assume more than 1.5% of bitcoin supply has been permanently lost) Cheers, aj