Quote from: bob123 on August 30, 2018, 08:39:09 AM

Quote from: Kakmakr on August 30, 2018, 06:52:18 AM

We need massive amounts of settlement tx's on-chain, when people open & close channels on the Lightning Network and the price of a bitcoin must grow exponentially for miners to be profitable. Undecided

With a big user base who is transacting daily on the LN, there will be enough on-chain transactions.
And if not, the fees for the on-chain transactions will be low enough for users to be attracted by on-chain tx's again.
I believe this will find an equilibrium.

Besides, these reason also makes miners still could get decent amount of TX fees :
1. Few people who don't want to use LN (due to various reason)
2. Services that too lazy to implement LN
3. People who prefer on-chain transaction for big/important transaction
4. LN (or most channel payment) still require at least 2 on-chain transaction (open/close channel), unless with other implementation such as Channel Factories

Quote from: Samarkand on August 30, 2018, 11:43:43 AM

Quote from: ETFbitcoin on August 29, 2018, 05:08:05 PM

...
Unfortunately it's impossible with current PoW algorithm/consensus method since people who have most efficient ASIC with cheapest electricity always win and in PoW, the winner takes all.
...

This may be true in theory, but in practice most miners are part of a mining
pool. Therefore they participate in the block reward every time that someone
from their pool "gets lucky" and manages to claim the block reward.

In the long-run this smoothes out the mining income and enables mining
on a more industrial scale. Of course there is still the possibility of mining
less than your expected share for a long time, but still taking part in a mining
pool reduces the variance inherent to a system that was designed as a
winner takes all system.

I wonder how Bitcoin would have turned out if we had never seen the emergence
of mining pools. The hashrate would probably be lower, because higher variance
would have made long-term planning and therefore industrial mining much more
difficult.

That means mining pool only reduce PoW's inherent system and majority still don't get anything (including big miners on other pool). Besides, it's trade-off if the miners care about anonymity/decentralization (even though almost one cares).

If mining pool is never exist, only people with big funds is able to mine Bitcoin while maintain profit, unless lots of people with low funds rely on luck.