Quote from: oryhp on July 10, 2022, 10:17:42 PM

I don't see how this isn't true for Bitcoin's model as well. This miner "enrichment" seems to be a function of security in $ value.
It doesn't matter whether the miners get their reward from the block subsidy, transaction fees or a combination of both. If you end up with a secure PoW system, then you must be enriching miners.
As far as I can tell, the only difference is that Bitcoin's long term plan is to do this only through transaction fees. The assumption is that we'll have a constant backlog of high fee paying txs that will substitute the vanishing block subsidy.
Even if this turns out to be correct, the miner reward will stay the same (assuming the same security). I'd argue the fee-only model might be worse on that front because transaction fees directly transfer value from the existing
users to the miners while block subsidy prints new coins. Unless I'm missing something, the latter seems to be less of an enrichment.

There is one small difference, the block subsidy affects the circulating supply. It doesn’t matter if the total circulating supply stays under 21 million, or doesnt inflate, for this effect to take place.

As a non-miner:

If the circulating supply increases, your piece of the pie decreases over time in this model(tail emissions).
If the circulating supply stays constant, you missed out on some increasing value you would have gotten otherwise from deflation.
If the circulating supply decreases, your increase in value would have been less than otherwise.

This affects all coins ever created regardless if they get used or not. In this scenario miners get enriched and have a kind of cantillon effect playing into their favour. Transaction fees might depend more on the fact that blocksize is limited and would be high anyways due to the limited space, this wouldn’t be lessened trough tail emissions. Just because we’re paying miners subsidies doesn’t mean we get cheaper fees. So i would argue tail emissions is the bigger enrichment, but the real downside is what i listed above. It affects monetary properties directly.

The Transaction fees only model doesn’t have this, that is the advantage, it’s not the enrichment that would be the danger. Even small changes can have big effects over longer periods of time.

And then we don’t even know if tail emissions would even be enough in the end. But if we as a community open the doors to trying to print our problems away, then people in the future might be tempted to take it even further. The best solution would be transaction fees only, if we want to keep Bitcoin the soundest money possible. It won’t be impossible to compensate miners when the most sound money in the world depends on it. So in my opinion keeping the original properties is more important, than trying to lessen some uncertainties now.