Let's imagine a situation. The year is 2140. No one is using the first layer for transactions anymore. All transactions are conducted on something like Ark protocol. There are 100 Ark service providers collectively generating 100 transactions in each block. They set a fee of 1.20 satoshis per vByte in their transactions. Miners go out of business and stop producing blocks. Network difficulty drops dramatically, and Bitcoin ceases to be a reliable store of value. Wouldn't it be better to take unused coins and use them to incentivize miners to continue their business?
This proposal won't fix the problem, it would just delay it, also, whatever issue you are describing is probably going to happen way before 2140, in 50-60 years at best the block rewards will be next to nothing, and then the incentives to mine
BTC would be different.
As it stands today, all mining is done for the incentive of profit, but at that point in time, if transaction fees are too low to keep a reasonable hashrate on the network, a new incentive will be created, something like mining to "protect your assets".
It could also be something like "blockchain fee" that everyone who owns
BTC and wants to secure it, must pay a small fee to protect the blockchain and thus protect their own assets/transactions.
The way that would work is unknown, it could be as simple as people mining at a loss to maintain the network or a protocol change that takes a certain % of all bitcoins in circulation and put it back to block rewards.
An example:
21,000,000 coins in circulation, let's say the target is to keep block rewards at 3
BTC per block, it means we need 157,680
BTC a year, we could charge 0.75% "blockchain fees" per year and keep the network as secure as it will be next year when the block reward drops to 3.125
BTC.
In fact, depending on the fiat value (or whatever the representation of the electricity bill then) we could get away with 1
BTC block reward or level less, and still keep a high enough hashrate that makes the network more secure than it is today or even better, so that suggested fee could drop to below 0.25% a year or so, and it could be adjustable based on some variables.
Notice the above proposal does not increase the supply of
BTC, it treats all
BTC the same regardless of it's history/owners, and it does maintain a very good incentive for
I am not sure if anyone has ever thought of such a proposal before, but it shouldn't be so uncommon, there could be many other proposals on how to fix that potential issue should
BTC stay treated as a store of value and rarely transacted, people will find a way to solve it (we are likely not going to be there to witness it).