Quote from: aliashraf on July 19, 2022, 08:17:57 AM

I'll do this in few hours, just for you Kiss

I sincerely apologize for failing to be on-time.
From where we left in Part 1, one can observe that
1- Peter Todd's "tail-emission" suggestion is settled as being strongly rejected as far as it is examined as a solution to the zero-subsidy dilemma, and as long as it is about bitcoin, @tromp nailed it.

Quote from: tromp on July 11, 2022, 09:32:06 AM

If there is only one way to get it right, then it would be tail emission from launch.
In gmaxwell's words, that's a pretty strong attractor in the design space, with nothing arbitrary about it.

2- The security concerns he has about the issue, disincentivized mining industry, mostly, is recognized as being serious.
2- Different alternative approaches/mitigations are presented.
This part is a walkthrough of the latter class of posts: alternatives to continuous subsidy or mitigations to the problem for bitcoin where tail subsidy is cut.

PART 2

Don't Break Anything, There Is Hope

Before starting to summarize the two major alternatives to tail subsidy, discussed in this topic, let's take a look at a third, less vocal, yet important view:

Alternative #0: In Whales, We Trust!
In case, God forbid, bitcoin security becomes fragile because of a drop in the hashrate due to miners' marginal profits vanishing which in turn would be the result of subsidy decrease/cut, whales will do something about it, like by bribing miners/donating large fees, and so on as they have huge incentives to keep their wealth secure, no worries.

Actually, Gregory Maxwell has drafted the groundwork for this approach in his first post:

Quote from: gmaxwell on July 10, 2022, 03:20:38 AM

{} If Bitcoin's scheme turns out to not work out then users in the future will have many alternatives they could consider-- including adopting Bitcoin variants that are created that have constant subsidy (as tail subsidizers propose) or attempt to achieve security through other means. To those people, should that future ever come to exist, the discussion will be much simpler though because they'll know if Satoshi's simple economic-effect minimizing scheme works or not, they'll know if alternatives are necessary.

Few posters have mentioned the whales solution, explicitly in the thread, not followed so much as it causes the discussion to be deferred infinitely, but taking into account Maxwell's mindset, I think it is where the community is for now: Nothing to worry about, it is working, miners are just stupid business people, whales and/or devs, God bless, will take care of us.

MY Take
Disclaimer: I hate whales because of jealousy or my left leaning mindset, or both. Tongue

Objection 1: Bitcoin is not a stake based system, you can't leave its security in hands of holders, they are mostly a bunch of greedy bastards.
Rather than the hodling (ugh) discourse, a true bitcoiner is the one who depends on transaction processing, the one who accepts bitcoin for his or her goods/services. Miners are awarded the silver badge for burning their fortunes and securing the transactions, so providing the infrastructure, the hero merchants aforementioned.
Miners deserve more respect than what bitcoin cult leaders show, on the contrary, whales go never close to the top of the bitcoin respect list. BTW, read the disclaimer above, again. Tongue

Objection 2: Since mass adoption is a critical priority, we need an established theory inclined toward newcomers and resilient against fiat-fed academic debunks, it can't include a whale based security justification.

Now we examine the two major alternatives presented in the topic, they share the same idea that there is something to be fixed but ...
Alterntive #1: Subsidize The Tail By Taxing The Head.
It is the first and the main trend proposed and supported firstly by @vujdue, @garlonicon (surprisingly, the same guys who presented the second approach as well ) The core idea being something like this:
It is possible to force, via a soft fork, an extra fee which is locked for long future, such that future miners, as a block builder, would be able to claim the reserved satoshis gradually, and as an extra income, a virtual block subsidy which infinitely continues without touching the 21M hard cap.

Quote from: garlonicon on July 10, 2022, 06:31:04 PM

Quote

But I do care that everyone else also chips in so we don't have a tragedy of the commons.

So make it a soft-fork proposal, where N out of M coins are locked in every coinbase transaction, to cover future rewards. It will have higher chances of being deployed than any other hard-fork, and will also increase future mining rewards. You want to get a 0.01 BTC tail emission? No problem, just send 0.01 BTC to block 1000000, then 0.01 BTC to block 1000001, and so on.

An alturistic version of this is discussed (no soft forks) as well, where people voluntarily chip-in for the same purpose.

MY Take
Disclaimer: check the disclaimer above again
Objection #1: This works as a negative pressure towards mass adoption because of the fees being lifted.
Objection #2: It fails to answer Greg Maxwell's original objection to Peter Todd, i.e.: How much tail subsidy is adequate and why?

Alternative #2: Follow Paul Sztorc
It is the second trend, advocated (again!) by @vjudue and @garlonicon. Putting it in the simplest sense, Sztorc says other than hard forking/ruining bitcoin by violating 21M hard cap or 1M block size limit, you have this beautiful option to support merge mined side-chains which provide new source of income hence incentives for miners.
@tromp, this wise guy, is the only one who has made a reasonable (though, mild) objection to the idea in this thread:

Quote from: tromp on July 11, 2022, 01:11:05 PM

Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on July 11, 2022, 12:50:49 PM

So, given that the majority of bitcoin blocks are already taking part in one or more merged mining protocols, what are the main arguments against using merged mining to create security once the block subsidy is insufficient?

If merge miners only make a small fraction of their revenue from bitcoin, then it becomes rather cheap to bribe them to mine censoring bitcoin blocks.
In that sense, the security of the bitcoin blockchain against censorship seems to depend on just the bitcoin block rewards.

Unfortunately, it didn't get enough attention let alone a proper answer, I'll fill this gap.

MY Take
Disclaimer: I've been busy for a long time working on a project based on the same ideas as what Paul Sztorc has been advocating for half decade or more; DYOR!

As of @tromp objection:
If it is just about solving the subsidy dilemma, @tromp objection would be plausible. IOW, you can't solve just one problem by such a disruptive idea, you shouldn't. Leaving the situation with pools and BIG mining farms that has centralized bitcoin mining scene so much, as is, makes it impossible to fix/improve anything in bitcoin.

As of Paul, @vjudeu, @garlnicon, ..., and the whole idea of zero emission, side-chain:
I'm a believer, but you need to read my take against @tromp's argument as well: It should be presented as a complete package, a framework, a project, even a cult-fork with established roadmap to fix th culte most crucial bitcoin issues including, not limited to, the dilemma under consideration. The most important candidates would be mining centralization, scaling, and mass adoption. I'd add two covert problems as well: whale cult and hacktupia(made it up, temporarily, just now).

P.S.
Wish you guys find this part useful, if so, you are welcome to correct me in case I've missed or misrepresented anything.