They claim a security problem due to the risk of 51% attacks making the price fall


Changing the supply schedule is not related to the scaling issue. The scaling issue is driven by the decentralization design ...

• There must be a substantial delay between blocks, so that all the nodes are able to remain synchronized
• The block size must be limited, so that it is affordable to run a node

These limits - 600 seconds and 4 million weight units - determine how many transactions can be processed per day

The supply limit is very, very high (2.1 quadrillion money units) so is not relevant to scaling

Conspiracy claims are always misguided

The "security budget" argument claims that if the hashrate falls, there will be enough spare, idle hashes to 51% attack
And then, why are people frightened of a 51% attack?
Mostly, this question goes unanswered
When it is answered, it is answered in prejudicial terms - Bitcoin would stop. Actually, Bitcoin won't stop. Miners will keep hashing. Nodes will keep verifying newly-mined blocks. So what is "Bitcoin will stop" code for?

Investors will lose confidence and the price will fall  to zero

Whether that's true or not (BTG still exists, and it's price isn't zero, after two 51% attacks), there's a more fundamental contradiction between "Bitcoin" and "the Bitcoin price market"

Bitcoin developers have never changed Bitcoin in order to protect Bitcoin's market price
Bitcoin developers will never change Bitcoin in order to protect Bitcoin's market price

Investors can accept that Bitcoin is a risky investment, or try to claim its price is some sort of protected species

The fallacy is in the investor's belief that Bitcoin is a synonym for "the price of Bitcoin"
and the corollary that the software should be changed to prevent the price from falling

Never going to happen

---

Just for fun, a different conspiracy claim ...

The "security budget" and tail emission claims were common in some forums 2 or 3 years ago. The proponents in those forums were always non-players, people with no history of participating in Bitcoin discussions. They were paid to disrupt the conversation. They didn't seriously want a change to the controlled supply schedule. They only wanted to create conflict within Bitcoin

After about the fourth iteration of one of these debates, I noticed that the proponent always disappeared after a week - a sign of the paid non-player. I challenged the next one with this - you're only going to be here a week, who is paying you. He deleted the post

Those people have vanished. But they left the conflict simmering behind them, like the burglar who shits on the bed while robbing a house

When they bothered to engage, after running out of arguments, they always claimed that large Bitcoin holders will support high hash rates by deliberately overpaying fees, because they have the most to lose if the market gets a fright and their investment value collapses, and they would do this collaboratively, a kind of "Bitcoin high-fee Association"

If there was a universal community consensus to have a tail emission (Peter Todd's proposal), then it would happen

But there are multiple flaws in the "security" and "51% attack" claims

Bitcoin mining is not "security" in the sense that the hash rate must be never be allowed to fall. The reward falls. Fees are always small, because the fee is set by the sender, not the miner. The hash rate will fall, and will fall far enough that there will one day be more idle hashes available to an attacker than the hashes in the mining network

But a 51% attack has no reward. And if a 51% attack happens, Bitcoin keeps on working

A tail emission is a small amount, not high enough to prevent the rise of idle hashing power sufficient to 51% attack. A tail emission might move the timing of this hashpower "flippening" a few months forward, not prevent it

He had a sponsor. The sponsor dumped him when he lost the Satoshi identity lawsuit in May, 2024

He had a history

Broke a non-compete clause, tried to steal his previous business partner's clients. Went into serious debt for the lawsuit costs
Made false Research & Development tax rebate claims as a way to make quick money to cover the lawsuit debt
The tax fraud was discovered by the Australian Tax Office
Attempted to retrospectively invent a R&D project - Bitcoin mining supercomputer, business partner in the USA
Successfully started a rumor that he is Satoshi Nakamoto, to embellish the fake R&D story
Fled to England to escape the tax scrutiny
Exercised his contact network. One of his contacts knows a guy who knows a billionaire looking for an investment opportunity
Between them, the billionaire and his two cronies created a deal - the billionaire paid the Australian tax debt in return for an opportunity to monetize Craig Wright's' claim to be Satoshi
Wright assigned all his intellectual property in Bitcoin, and took a senior management role in the development of "Bitcoin" as a business opportunity for the billionaire
Wright forked BCH into BSV, claimed BSV is the real Bitcoin, and claimed BTC is corrupted
Wright launched lawsuits claiming some innovative new forms of copyright, and demanded that BTC should be shut down
All those lawsuits have now been struck out

The billionaire cut him off
He attempted a new lawsuit. With no money to pay lawyers, he used ChatGPT as his legal research
The new lawsuit breaches the injunctions imposed when he lost the other lawsuits - not permitted to claim ownership of the Bitcoin system
Convicted of contempt of court for breaching the anti-suit injunctions, 1 year sentence, suspended for 2 years

The maximum sentence for contempt of court is 2 years. The lawyers asked the judge for 2 years, not suspended. The judge chose 1 year, suspended for 2 years. It is rare for contempt sentences to be longer than 30 days, but this case was serious

Suspended sentence means that if he breaches the Judge's injunctions against Bitcoin-related lawsuits, he gets to serve the 1 year, he gets another contempt conviction with a longer sentence, and he has to serve both. If he stops now, then the injunctions are effective, he doesn't make any more fraudulent lawsuits. If he tries again, he gets his 1 year in prison, plus more prison time


Ludicrous conspiracy talk. Get real

Bitcoin mining uses energy. Bitcoin does not. In this discussion, it is not correct to ask "will this affect Bitcoin?", because it is only relevant to Bitcoin mining. Bitcoin needs miners. Bitcoin does not need millions of miners hashing at 800 million trillion hashes per second. Bitcoin works equally well with 1000 miners at 4000 trillion hashes per second, using less energy than a single Tesla car

Some years ago, regulators ran a public relations campaign against Bitcoin, advocating several perceived flaws. Only one of these flaws gained any public recognition - Bitcoin mining energy use

Since then, anti-Bitcoin campaigns have focused on this single issue, as if they care. But the real goal is to shut down Bitcoin

Bitcoin mining fact: Bitcoin mines a fixed amount of BTC per day. Unlike mineral extraction, if more miners join the network, they don't make more Bitcoin. They reduce the amount of Bitcoin earned by every miner. The fixed amount automatically halves every 210,000 blocks

Bitcoin economics: if the dollar cost of mining Bitcoin is less than the dollars received for selling the mined Bitcoin, the miner makes a profit

Most of the cost is electricity, which is dependent on the per-kW-hour cost of electricity, the number of kW-hours per trillion hashes (efficiency of miner's hardware), and the number of hashes

The income is a fixed amount of BTC per day, shared among all the miners. A miner's dollar income depends on the dollar price of BTC and his share of the fixed daily amount of mined BTC

Why did energy use increase? Because the price of Bitcoin increased

If the world of governments and regulators wanted to reduce Bitcoin energy use, what could they do?

• reduce the dollar value of Bitcoin
• increase electricity prices for Bitcoin miners

BTC price manipulation is probably outside the scope of regulators, for several reasons, most of them obvious 

Electricity price surcharges would reduce Bitcoin mining in proportion to the size of the surcharge. If Bitcoin miners have recently converged to a $0.06 per kW-hour price for profitability, increase the price to $6 to reduce electricity consumption by 99%

On a regional basis, this already happens (although not so high as $6)

Where are these places with $0.06 electricity prices? Nearly all are in locations with hydroelectric generation, where the supply is much greater than consumption
The miners arrive, find some land, pay for electricity supply to connect the shipping container, warehouse, or shed. The word gets out - $0.06 electricity, great place for Bitcoin mining. More miners arrive. In upper New York State, and north of the border in Quebec, 6 months after the arrival of Bitcoin miners exploiting cheap, plentiful hydroelectricity, all the surplus electricity was allocated, causing shortages for the regular consumers and price increases. The hydroelectricity supplier in New York banned the miners. In Quebec, they banned new miners, and eventually chose to limit the amount miners can use, and added a price surcharge specifically for Bitcoin miners

Will there be a worldwide Electricity price surcharge for Bitcoin miners, to address these emissions/climate issues? No, there will not, because the regulators' goal is to kill Bitcoin, not to reduce the electricity consumption of Bitcoin mining

It's a fake concern. They're all liars

The Craig Wright Satoshi identity trial judgment found against Wright in May, 2024. In July, 2024 the judge reversed the 2021 bitcoin.org judgment
https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/COPA-v-Wright-Approved-FOO-Judgment-16.07.2024.pdf
Scroll down to "What should happen in the COBRA and McCormack claims"

It has never been the responsibility of the Bitcoin software developers to protect the value of your Bitcoin investment
It never will be the responsibility of the Bitcoin software developers to protect the value of your Bitcoin investment

You heard bullshit
There are approximately 24,000 unspent 50-BTC P2PK TXOs, each with a different pubkey. They were not mined by only one person



What theft? Anybody with the means to sign a txinput can spend a UTXO 

What chaos? You're making a doom assertion without explaining what you're frightened of

Decentralization is not an end in itself. It serves Bitcoin's main purpose - cash-like on-line transactions. To be cash-like, Bitcoin was implemented as a decentralized network of nodes. To be reliable, each node independently verifies every transaction before committing it to the permanent transaction history. Without cooperating, every node makes exactly the same judgment about every new block and all the block's transactions. There is no democracy, no voting. As long as all nodes arrive at the same transaction history, Bitcoin keeps working. Bitcoin even tolerates some nodes diverging from the common transaction history. Those nodes cease to participate in Bitcoin. The Bitcoin network operates as a supermajority - every node independently discovers the same transaction history

The Bitcoin price market, and the distribution of ownership, are separate from Bitcoin. Nothing in the code which runs a Bitcoin node has any control over who owns what quantity of Bitcoin, or how much fiat money was used to buy it. These markets may or may not be corrupt, or may become corrupt in future. Bitcoin does not care. Nobody who operates a Bitcoin node would ever demand that Bitcoin's node software should be modified to prevent price manipulation or concentration of ownership

The other side of decentralization (and the supermajority) is that every software change must be adopted by every node. Or, enough nodes must upgrade to accept a software change such that Bitcoin is still effectively decentralized even if its node network shrinks substantially. This is a disincentive to making changes. The most recent urgent change was in 2013, when the network was still small enough to be considered centralized

A home miner doesn't pay million-dollar salaries to an army of consultants - lawyers, accountants, finance brokers
But big corp miner can currently get away with losing money, because shareholders are optimistic, willing to top up the balance sheet by buying more shares

Hexadecimal has been a convenient way to represent binary data since the 1960s or earlier. It's not special to Bitcoin

No they were not bought. They just don't exist. Deterministic wallets (your words) did not exist in those years
The Berkeley/DB format of wallets from that time is not viewable using Notepad
But what motivates someone to post such a hoax here?

You don't need to do this to make outgoing connections. Your node will make up to 8 outgoing connections. If it's a new node, still initializing its blockchain, it won't accept incoming connections anyway, not until the initialization is complete. Even after that, a node works perfectly well with only 8 outgoing connections

Read the debug.log

Do not scramble the seed words. Do not write the words on random pages in a book, Do not change the order of the words. Do not omit one or more words.  Do not encrypt the words in a MS-Word file or Veracrypt or anything. Do not write only the first four characters. Do not write the index numbers of the words

All those things corrupt the fundamental purpose of the BIP39 recovery design - recovery

The chances of losing your coins because your obfuscation method was too confusing (later, when you need to do a recovery) are about 1000 times higher than the chance of being questioned at an international border

Do not store the seed words in the cloud, or anywhere electronically. This has two risks. The cloud is not a reliable storage method. The cloud is accessible to the entire Internet

The BIP39 specification has a passphrase option

Write the seed words on paper. Carry the paper. Keep other copies in safe places

Make two wallets (or 2 accounts in a Trezor or other cold wallet). One account is the seed words and no passphrase, with a few thousand Satoshis. The other account is the same seed words and a strong pass phrase, for your Bitcoin

Make a 6-word diceware passphrase. Add one random alphabetical character. This is easy to remember, and 81-bits secure
https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

Memorize the passphrase

At the border: if you're questioned about your cold wallet (if you're carrying it), tell them what it is. If you're questioned about your seed phrase, tell them what it is. If they want to see the Bitcoin wallet, use the seed phrase to recover the no-passphrase wallet. Show them your few thousand Satoshis. That should be further than any border guard could possibly understand, today. In the future they may be better trained. Or you could be a special person (read about the constant border harassment of Glenn Greenwald and his partner for years after Greenwald reported on Snowden). If they ask whether there's a second account, you don't understand how that's possible. Your device has only one wallet

GPG keys were never imported into the Bitcoin client. It's never worked like this
In 2010, for for some years later, GPG developers refused to support Bitcoin key pairs. Specifically, the EC curve used in Bitcoin (secp256k1) was not implemented in GPG, and the GPG developer forum discussed adding it, and chose not to

For whatever reason, you've invented this very specific technical detail, but got it so wrong that your entire post is an obvious hoax

This is a FAQ
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Help:FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_generated,_what_happens_when_Bitcoins_are_lost?_Won't_that_be_a_problem?

A PKH address is a ripe160 hash of a sha256 hash of a pubkey, with a one-byte prefix and a 4-byte checksum suffix 

But a hash is irreversible, so there's no way to know whether any arbitrary 160-bit string was created from a pubkey. And it is trivial to make a random 160-bit string appear to be a Bitcoin address - prepend the prefix, calculate the checksum and append it. For example ...

x'FF000000000000000000000000000000000000FF' is 1QFKJvAyJ1EBHtYqxZd1Wq2TCDPQY7UqMD
The checksum x'BA873B0C' is valid, which means by your definition, it's spendable


Correction. An OP_RETURN TXO does not have an address, so it's not "sent to a burn address"

Nothing would happen. I read a Peter Todd quote a few weeks ago after the fake documentary named him. I can't find it now, something along the lines of, "spent many years reading the source code to understand Bitcoin. Bitcoin is that published code, it is not the original developer's person"

That's a terrible paraphrase. If someone can link me Todd's original, I'd be grateful

decoderawtransaction reports the vsize