"Long time listener, first time caller". Just sharing my 2 sats:

While I find it stimulating, I think this discussion (and other similar doom-like scenarios) is somewhat irrelevant in practice.

When the time comes and if we start seeing issues with block rewards being too low to maintain acceptable security, we're going to have multiple solutions being implemented for it, and definitely a hard fork to indefinitely maintain some degree of block subsidy is going to be within them.
If it is indeed confirmed that the original chain is now insecure, consensus should eventually coalesce in one of the hard forks that can actually keep moving forward with some degree of security assurance.

I feel like people sometimes think of these systems as when they fail there's a full loss, but that's not the case as the history is not lost, and so we can move forward from that history with multiple alternatives and allow the social/economic consensus to dictate which one becomes the new accepted chain.
The genie is out of the box, and some chain whose history is prefixed by Bitcoin's current chain history will always exist.
The only type of problems we should truly be worrying about are ones that might invalidate the security of the history itself, like a cryptographic breakthrough (quantum computing for example) that would turn some or all utxos into "anyone can spend".

Transitions might be disorderly and filled with drama and discussion as the "block size wars" in 2017, but anyone who doesn't want to "vote", can always just keep their utxos frozen in place while the drama sorts itself out, and maintain whatever holdings they previously had on the new accepted chain.

Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev <bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> escreveu no dia domingo, 19/06/2022 à(s) 11:32:
On Sun, Jun 12, 2022 at 07:16:49PM +0000, alicexbt wrote:
> Hi Peter,
>
> > Only because the block reward goes away. If it was made to continue
> > indefinitely - most likely with an inflation hard fork - demand for block space
> > would not be critical to Bitcoin's security.
>
>
> I am not completely against your proposal although 100% sure this will not have "consensus" to be implemented. I think if bitcoin doesn't have enough demand for block space, it should die. I will be sad if bitcoin doesn't exist but it should be a lesson for all the people opposing soft forks based on drama and politics instead of technical review.
>
> I don't see anything wrong with users paying 100x fees for opening and closing LN channels.

The PoW security of Bitcoin benefits all Bitcoin users, proportional to the
value of BTC they hold; if Bitcoin blocks aren't reliably created the value of
*all* BTC goes down. It doesn't make sense for the entire cost of that security
to be paid for on a per-tx basis. And there's a high chance paying for it on a
per-tx basis won't work anyway due to lack of consistent demand.

It would be extremely unfortunate if one of the very few decentralized ways to
store value died simply because we couldn't find a way to pay to keep it
secure.

--
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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