Are We Underestimating Bitcoin's Long-Term Security?

Lately, I've been diving deep into the whole Bitcoin security budget thing. It feels like no one talks about it much, right? Everyone's obsessed with prices and ETFs, but what happens when block rewards drop to zero? I've heard the usual response, "The fee market will pick up and miners will be fine." But does that really make sense?

Nah, I think you’ve got it wrong. It’s not like we’re missing anything major. The doubts about mining incentives have been addressed. Transaction fees will reward miners just fine. The blockchain will still be secure with miners validating everything. Are you sure you've heard something different from Pierre Rochard or are you just overreacting like others?

Bitcoin's only like 15 years old. I bet the fee market will grow over time. We're still far from the block subsidy hitting zero. But in the end, it's all just speculation. Anyone saying this is all figured out is just fooling themselves to feel better about their investments.

On-chain Bitcoin is super secure. If people want solid security for their transactions, they'll stick to on-chain Bitcoin. Recently, mempools are doing great with low fees, like 1 satoshi per byte. Even non-techies can enjoy those low fees, and if they wanna learn a bit more, they can broadcast transactions for even less.

I don’t see this ecosystem pushing second layer solutions hard enough. Sure, some centralized services are promoting them, but it’s not a big deal. L2s are just built on Bitcoin Core transactions. They won't lower fees on the blockchain. If L2 usage goes up, so does the traffic on Bitcoin Core, and that’ll raise fees.

It all depends on how Bitcoin adapts over the next century. I’ve thought about this too. Once all blocks are mined, I think a lot of small miners will just shut down. Public companies might diversify into other revenue sources, like AI, which we've already seen. Right now, average transaction fees are just around $200K to $240K with a daily volume of $20 billion. That’s not much when spread out.

A big reason for the worries is a wrong assumption. If you start with a false assumption, you can draw any conclusion you want. About the security budget, people think it always needs to grow and that things will stay the same forever. But it’s supposed to be dynamic, which is why difficulty adjustments exist. Bitcoin's been growing fast, so we’ve mostly seen mining power rise.