{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub1fx98zxt3lzspjs5f4msr0fxysx5euucm29ghysryju7vpc9j0jzqtcl2d8","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub1fx98zxt3lzspjs5f4msr0fxysx5euucm29ghysryju7vpc9j0jzqtcl2d8","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2015-08-14\n📝 Original message:On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 9:52 PM, Elliot Olds \u003celliot.olds at gmail.com\u003e wrote:\n\u003e On Wed, Aug 12, 2015 at 2:59 AM, Jorge Timón\n\u003e \u003cbitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org\u003e wrote:\n\u003e\u003e\n\u003e\u003e I believe all concerns I've read can be classified in the following\n\u003e\u003e groups:\n\u003e\u003e\n\u003e\u003e \u003e 1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.\n\u003e\n\u003e\n\u003e I'd rephrase this as \"Consequences of high fees.\" It's the level of fees\n\u003e that is the main issue, not their movement.\n\nI think potential is more general since it allows us to list uncertain\nconsequences (aren't all consequences just projections and thus\nuncertain anyway?).\n\n\u003e Moving from 0 satoshi to 1 satoshi fees makes no real difference.\n\nIt is a big difference to me (it may mean policy code has improved a\nlot in the process).\nAnyway, I'm heppy to hear again that this is not a concern, at some\npoint I thought this was the ONLY concern, so I was clearly\nmisinterpreting people's arguments.\n\n\u003e Moving from $0 to $1 fees makes a\n\u003e huge difference. Some consequences are indirect, but others are not (the\n\u003e first three below are not indirect). Some of the consequences are uncertain,\n\u003e but others we can have very high confidence in (again: the first three) and\n\u003e it's only their effect size that can be reasonably disputed.\n\nLet's list them all first and then identify which are more worrying in\nthe short term.\n\n\u003e Here are lots of reasons that you're missing. High fees do the following:\n\u003e\n\u003e -Reduce the utility of people using the network, even if the higher fees\n\u003e don't reduce their amount of transactions.\n\n\"Utility\" like \"value\" is always subjective and very vague. I prefer\nto identify more concrete ways in which \"utility is reduced\".\n\n\u003e -Make some use cases nonviable, depriving people of Bitcoin's decentralized\n\u003e benefits.\n\nIt is clear that not all use cases fit the blockchain, but it's still\nunclear which ones don't fit yet.\nBut the amount of use cases supported is not a valid metric for\ndecentralization.\nIn any case, it would be interesting if we could list some concrete\ncases that would be lost.\n\n\u003e -Makes level 2 infrastructure like Lightning less valuable by increasing the\n\u003e minimum value of anchor txns that make sense, and increasing the amount of\n\u003e pain suffered when your counterparty misbehaves.\n\nThis is correct. Layer 2 can become more expensive in total as well\n(it doesn't mean layer 2 doesn't scale though).\nI wil add it as 1.3\n\n\u003e -Discourage experimentation with new Bitcoin use cases, making it more\n\u003e unlikely that such cases are discovered/improved/popular before Bitcoin's\n\u003e security relies on having many users.\n\nExperimentation can be done with worthless testchains. I'm not sure\nI'm following on this one.\n\n\u003e -Makes Bitcoin more vulnerable to regulation by keeping its user base from\n\u003e growing, meaning regulators face less pressure to keep it unregulated (see:\n\u003e Uber)\n\nAdded:\n\n1.4) Less users than we could have had with a bigger size\n1.4.1) More regulation pressure\n\n\u003e -Reduce the amount of time we have between now and when tx fees need to pay\n\u003e for a significant portion of Bitcoin's security, by keeping the exchange\n\u003e rate and thus the value of block rewards low\n\u003e (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Equation_of_exchange)\n\nRelated to exchange rate.\n\n\u003e -By slowing usage growth, make it less likely that we have a large enough\n\u003e base of transactions by the time we need to fund network security via tx\n\u003e fees.\n\nAdded:\n\n1.4.2) Not enough fees when subsidy is lower\n\nResulting list:\n\n1) Potential indirect consequence of rising fees.\n\n1.1) Lowest fee transactions (currently free transactions) will become\nmore unreliable.\n1.2) People will migrate to competing systems (PoW altcoins) with lower fees.\n1.3) Layer 2 settlements become more expensive\n1.4) Less users than we could have had with a bigger size\n1.4.1) More regulation pressure\n1.4.2) Not enough fees when subsidy is lower\n\n2) Software problem independent of a concrete block size that needs to\nbe solved anyway, often specific to Bitcoin Core (ie other\nimplementations, say libbitcoin may not necessarily share these\nproblems).\n\n2.1) Bitcoin Core's mempool is unbounded in size and can make the program\ncrash by using too much memory.\n\n2.2) There's no good way to increase the fee of a transaction that is\ntaking too long to be mined without the \"double spending\" transaction\nwith the higher fee being blocked by most nodes which follow Bitcoin\nCore's default policy for conflicting spends replacements (aka \"first\nseen\" replacement policy)."}