Most of the conversation seems to have been about ensuring sufficient transaction fees are paid to miners. But what about the verifiers? Currently, all tx validation is done by volunteers. I think Satoshi initially intended for validators to double as miners, but in a world where the two are largely mutually distinct, how do we support the verifiers? And if we can't, isn't the network doomed anyway?
Related to this is something I have not seen considered: the upper limit on hash speed per device.
A naiive calculation would go like this. Take the universe's maximum bit-operations/second (assuming it exists) as the speed of light in nanometers/second, or 3x10^17 (ie. 300 peta(nm/s)). Suppose a SHA256 takes 1000 bit operations. So we can say ASICs will top out at 0.3 PH/S or 300 TH/S (from what I can tell, they are currently around 1-10 TH/s, so this would be order of 10-100 times speed up). I know very little about hardware, but given the incentives and the acceleration of knowledge, this may not be unreasonable within say the next 20 years, to pull a number out of my ass. All this assuming of course there is an upper bound set by the cosmos on computations per second, which may or may not be reasonable, depending on your approach to modern physics. Of course my estimate of SHA256 bit ops may be wildly off and obviously depends on the size of the input, but it doesn't matter - what does matter is ASIC manufacturers reach the limit in the next couple (maybe even five?!) decades. Suppose its a graphene based breakthrough, if you're hung up on transistors and the end of Moore's Law.
(As an aside, note that it takes ~40ms to get from New York to Hong Kong at the speed of light. So unless we break that barrier, high performance large scale distributed systems are kind of screwed anyways. In other words, the speed of light is too slow for our needs
).
Supposing ASICs do reach this limit (and will probably be the first devices in our corner of the cosmos to do so), then some point afterward we will be seemingly back to the kind of thing Satoshi originally envisioned. A 300TH/s ASIC cheap as a modern CPU today. One 300 TH/s ASIC, 1 vote. Of course there is still the centralization incentive, so let's assume we have solved that by transitioning to something like Hashimoto or another such hashing scheme that requires the entire blockchain to be available to the miner. The next step, driven by market demand of regular people mining again, will then be ASIC EC verification. Give it a couple decades or so to also become "cheap as a cpu".
Now we're in a situation again where full nodes validate and mine, just like the good ole days, supporting the system for the same reasons bittorrent is supported - it's useful, it provides for us, it sticks it to the man, whatever.
And they lived happily ever after?
Related to this is something I have not seen considered: the upper limit on hash speed per device.
A naiive calculation would go like this. Take the universe's maximum bit-operations/second (assuming it exists) as the speed of light in nanometers/second, or 3x10^17 (ie. 300 peta(nm/s)). Suppose a SHA256 takes 1000 bit operations. So we can say ASICs will top out at 0.3 PH/S or 300 TH/S (from what I can tell, they are currently around 1-10 TH/s, so this would be order of 10-100 times speed up). I know very little about hardware, but given the incentives and the acceleration of knowledge, this may not be unreasonable within say the next 20 years, to pull a number out of my ass. All this assuming of course there is an upper bound set by the cosmos on computations per second, which may or may not be reasonable, depending on your approach to modern physics. Of course my estimate of SHA256 bit ops may be wildly off and obviously depends on the size of the input, but it doesn't matter - what does matter is ASIC manufacturers reach the limit in the next couple (maybe even five?!) decades. Suppose its a graphene based breakthrough, if you're hung up on transistors and the end of Moore's Law.
(As an aside, note that it takes ~40ms to get from New York to Hong Kong at the speed of light. So unless we break that barrier, high performance large scale distributed systems are kind of screwed anyways. In other words, the speed of light is too slow for our needs
). Supposing ASICs do reach this limit (and will probably be the first devices in our corner of the cosmos to do so), then some point afterward we will be seemingly back to the kind of thing Satoshi originally envisioned. A 300TH/s ASIC cheap as a modern CPU today. One 300 TH/s ASIC, 1 vote. Of course there is still the centralization incentive, so let's assume we have solved that by transitioning to something like Hashimoto or another such hashing scheme that requires the entire blockchain to be available to the miner. The next step, driven by market demand of regular people mining again, will then be ASIC EC verification. Give it a couple decades or so to also become "cheap as a cpu".
Now we're in a situation again where full nodes validate and mine, just like the good ole days, supporting the system for the same reasons bittorrent is supported - it's useful, it provides for us, it sticks it to the man, whatever.
And they lived happily ever after?