Quote from: leannemckim46 on September 20, 2014, 09:29:36 PM

Quote from: zimmah on September 20, 2014, 03:30:50 PM

Quote from: bitebits on September 20, 2014, 07:10:09 AM

Quote from: zimmah on September 20, 2014, 03:32:11 AM

seriously, if bitcoin is not massively used (like thousands of transactions per second) by the time block rewards become really small, it can pretty much be considered a failure.

Bitcoin will become more and more a store of value. Why is that considered to be a failure, when this is by design?

Because, if there are not enough transactions, the miners will stop mining, and the network becomes less secure, and more likely to be controlled by a single malicious person.

This is a true statement, however it is not looking like things will work out this way. Transaction growth has grown exponentially since the birth of bitcoin, even as the price has stagnated. As a result the miners are getting larger amounts of TX rewards as time progresses.

I also think the network security is greater then it really needs to be now. I would hypothesize that the difficulty could decrease by a large factor and the network would still be sufficiently secure.

"Security of the network" can be boiled down to simple economics: if the potential gain someone could see from attacking the Bitcoin network is less than the cost to attack it, it will happen. If difficulty were to decrease by a large factor, not only would it become easier to attack the network, but that would indicate that there would be large amounts of idle hardware which could then potentially be used to do so.

johnnyrocket

Posts

Merits