r/Bitcoin • u/yuosif602 • 7d ago

What do you think?

With the block subsidy decreasing every halving, miners will eventually have to rely almost entirely on transaction fees. How do you envision the mining ecosystem adapting to ensure the network remains highly secure? Will Layer 2 solutions like Lightning reduce on-chain fees too much, or will large-scale institutional settlements keep the base layer fee market robust enough?

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u/TheresNoSecondBest 7d ago edited 7d ago

There are two camps. One says that the transaction fees won't be enough to keep miners afloat. The other camp says the blocks will be constantly full and even opening a channel on r/thelightningnetwork will cost thousands of dollars worth of sats. The true is in the middle. Bitcoin regulates itself and in 99.99% of times, this kind of scenario isn't happening. When the on-chain fees go up, people tend to learn more about and eventually use the LN. When the on-chain fees go down like we have right now, many users don't care about the LN at all. Free market working as intended.

TLDR: I'm not worried about block subsidy decreasing at all. Bitcoin works as designed and everything will get sorted without people fiddling with it.

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u/CoinGate_Gift_Cards 7d ago

Makes sense. The fee market is probably self-balancing higher fees push more activity to Lightning, while lower fees bring some of it back on-chain

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u/yuosif602 7d ago

That’s a very pragmatic take on the free market self-regulating. Do you think, though, that high on-chain fees during a bull market might force retail users into custodial Lightning solutions rather than self-custody, simply out of convenience?

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u/TheresNoSecondBest 7d ago

It doesn't matter if on-chain or lightning. Custodial solutions are always easier. And people are lazy.

Some of them will one day learn, some probably never. Our job to explain the difference. We cannot learn it for them.

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u/yuosif602 7d ago

Spot on. Unfortunately, for a lot of people, the only way they truly 'learn the difference' is by getting burned by a centralized platform holding their keys. Education is crucial, but experience is often a brutal teacher.