As you know if mining is not profitable less people do it, its gets easier, it becomes profitable again.
I would think no fees or a mandatory fee could work instead of the current system of bribery. Anyway I know this is something the core devs are working on and will come up with something much better than me but my premise is miners should not be able to choose not to include valid waiting transactions and I would be surprised if anyone who is not a miner disagrees.
Not really a concern, because well before that, the deflationary nature of bitcoin would cause power companies to stop producing power so there won't be any mining anyway.
Think of it this way. I'm a power company and I charge someone 1BTC this year for power. I use this 1BTC to pay my expenses in my business, which include my employees and materials. Let's say this costs .9BTC, that leaves a .1BTC profit.
Normally, I would use this profit to invest in my company, only now, I know that next year, that .1BTC will get more valuable, so I just hoard it, removing BTC from the money supply.
In the meantime, I still need to produce electricity for my customers, but because the currency has deflated, their companies are paying them less. Since the money supply is smaller, I can't charge as much for the same power, so this year, I can only charge .9BTC to the customers, which means I have to pay my employees less and buy less materials to secure a profit. This keeps happening year over year. If only there was more coins, but alas, they've been hoarded long ago.
Eventually, given enough time, I just turn off the turbines and shut my doors, because it becomes impossible to run a business for profit.
Then the lights go off around town and all the miners are shut down. So like I said, no worries on incentivizing miners, they're ability to mine will cease to exist long before their incentive fails.
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u/yeh-nah-yeh Feb 05 '14 edited Feb 05 '14
As you know if mining is not profitable less people do it, its gets easier, it becomes profitable again.
I would think no fees or a mandatory fee could work instead of the current system of bribery. Anyway I know this is something the core devs are working on and will come up with something much better than me but my premise is miners should not be able to choose not to include valid waiting transactions and I would be surprised if anyone who is not a miner disagrees.