Oddbean new post about login | logout Starting in 2048, the precision of 8 decimal places for #bitcoin will cause the sub-sat block reward component to be lost. I would support a hard fork to add more decimal places. Better start planning now! We can beat 2140 back as far as we’d like by adding decimal places.
Go fork yourself!
😂 I suppose it’s not entirely clear whether that would be a hard fork or not. Bitcoin can be created indefinitely without violating the consensus rules or the 21 million cap in the pure mathematical sense. But will 0.5 sats ever be a meaningful mining incentive? How about 0.00625 sats? I’m guessing no, but I’ve been surprised by bitcoin many times before and I’ve been wrong more often than right since 2010.
Yes it would require a hardfork, and no one who actually understand the technology would support such a change. And almost anyone in the bitcoin space would object to it, if for no more reason than it would increase the supply of bitcoin above 21 million. This will never happen and there is no good reason for it to. The risk of bugs alone is reason not to do it. If you think "adding more decimal places" is a simple change you're mistaken. For one thing, bitcoin has no decimal places. In the code, there is no "bitcoin" it's only satoshis. The 100 million satoshi as "one bitcoin" is completely arbitrary and does not exist in the code at all. Bitcoin does not use decimal places, it used fixed point integral values.
Average fee per block is 0.0835 Bitcoin right now. That will be the same or higher in 20 years. The security budget is a solved problem which had been a part of Bitcoin since inception. The block reward will be irrelevant by 2048. There are probably only 2 or 3 meaningful halvings left until the network is essentially in its end state.
I wish I had a plot of tx fees in bitcoin over time. Fees were 0 per block for years. But I feel like fees have fallen in bitcoin terms as price has increased over the years.
It's been volitile, but the number of transactions has been consistently growing. If it wasn't for segwit we would probably have higher fees than the reward already. We were on pace in 2016/17. But either way, there is still no issue. Let's say hypothetically there are zero transactions waiting with a fee. There wouldn't be any mining! Which would mean no blocks. And after a long period of no blocks, eventually someone would want to use Bitcoin, so they would submit a fee and someone would mine it. It's a pretty well contained, self correcting market. I could even see block time variance decreasing as transaction demand becomes higher and more consistent, and miners want to capitalize on fees.
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Bitcoin has 8 decimal places. So when the block reward gets halved, it adds a decimal place to block reward. 25 —> 12.5 —> 6.25 —> 3.125 —> 1.5625…—>0.09765625 The next halving will lose 0.000000005 bitcoin from the block reward due to precision limitation. Mathematically, the reward could be bigger. But in terms of computer memory, more decimal places means more memory. I highly doubt such precision will ever be necessary, but I’ve been wrong before.