Quote from: smooth on December 27, 2013, 03:56:48 AM

Quote from: go1111111 on December 25, 2013, 03:35:22 AM

The question is: is 2% of global wealth devoted to protecting the Bitcoin network overkill?

The financial sector is roughly 10% of US GDP so 2% isn't automatically a "wasteful" number. It might be, depending on how much more efficient the rest of the financial sector becomes, or how much incremental wealth is created by people using bitcoin.

Also, the issue with 25 BTC/block is entirely temporary. When the block reward gets cut in half in ~2 years your 2% estimate instantly drops to 1% (and then 1/2% at the next reward drop). Of course that ignores transaction fees.

You can safely ignore transactions fees for the moment.
Without the once in a while mistakes when somebody pays some outrageous tx fees , it has rarely touched 50BTC per day and only 10-15 lately.