Quote from: squatter on July 25, 2019, 10:06:16 PM

Quote from: Khaos77 on July 23, 2019, 08:41:49 PM

Error 3: Transaction fees alone will not be able to maintain Bitcoin insane energy waste.
http://randomwalker.info/publications/mining_CCS.pdf

Quote

On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward

Bitcoin provides two incentives for miners: block rewards and transaction fees.
The former accounts for the vast majority of miner revenues at the beginning of the system, but it is expected to transition to the latter as the block rewards dwindle. There has been an implicit belief that whether miners are paid by block rewards or transaction fees does not affect the security of the block chain. We show that this is not the case. Our key insight is that with only transaction fees, the variance of the block reward is very high due to the exponentially distributed block arrival time, and it becomes attractive to fork a wealthy block to steal the rewards therein. We show that this results in an equilibrium with undesirable properties for Bitcoins security and performance, and even non-equilibria in some circumstances.

This sort of speculation about block reward variance is premature. It seems like the authors are drastically overstating the effect of block times on block rewards. They don't account for the fact that the Poisson distribution evens out over time, just like the average 10 minute target block time. They are cherry picking to suggest that empty blocks over the short run aren't mitigated by full blocks with high fees on the other side of the spectrum. I also question their assumptions about the success of forks that are incompatible with full nodes. I think history has shown that miners are far less powerful vis-a-vis consensus change than people once assumed.

Miners can't change consensus but they can easily run a chain rewrite attack if there is some incentive. Bitcoin wouldn't survive with a high enough incentive system and its subsequent resource consumptions in mining, as we need to keep block size low lowering the block reward should/may be compensated by price surge but removing it puts all the burden on tx fees which ends in high fees or low security situation.