Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: Ordinals and other non-monetary "use cases" as miner reward on 2140+
by
tread93
on 06/07/2024, 17:57:11 UTC
So basically there's some people that theorize about what will happen in 2140+ (to put the extreme scenario in which no further Bitcoin will be generated, but this should be hit in practice way sooner due very low inflation rate) when no longer there will be more BTC issued, so then the question remains to be answered:
How will miners find an incentive to mine blocks if there is no block reward left?

Some people claim that the transaction fees will be enough. Others say that the price will be so high that there will be not enough transaction volume for this to compensate miner activity (then again wouldn't the high fees be enough incentive?).

Well what if the fees are not enough, or there are not enough volume tx going on, or anything else? Would non-monetary use cases like Ordinal inscriptions solve the problem? I imagine in the future blocks will contain massive amounts of second layer transactions and it will be a settlement layer 1 network only. The fees will be very high, so maybe between regular transactions + other use cases it will be enough to keep miners working?

I have been trying to decide if ordinals and basically anything but monetary transactions are a massive amount of time and resources, or perhaps they would actually help with the miner incentive structure?

Obviously, the top priority should always be monetary transactions, then if that wasn't enough, the incentive could be filled with non-monetary transactions. Perhaps at the protocol level, make it so that monetary transactions go first, then with less priority process non-monetary transactions. We should consider if ordinals can be saved or not long term, if these use cases could deliver something useful. If they will only bring problems, then perhaps a full frontal attack on them and planning to stop them may be best. But im still open to discuss this before I pick a side.

The thing is that by 2140 we will all be gone and by then our heirs will hopefully have received their inheritance and all the bitcoins will be in new hands. What I have read is that when the last bitcoin has been mined miners will still make money off of the fees for the transactions that still occur on the network and that will keep the network and miners running. You've got to hand it to Satoshi for setting it up this way. Back in the 1900s you had folks mining silver and gold and we are now in the Bitcoin gold rush! There are still many coins to be mined! Its kind of wild because 2140 is in 116 years and it has only been 176 years since the start of the gold rush in 1848. Look at how much gold has increased in value since then, I can only imagine what Bitcoin will be at in 2140. I only wish we could live to see what happens!