sigh I get so tired of having to stop working to put out a post explaining issues. If anyone else wants to join in I could use help. (actually I've seen Jonald F. do this before too, so thanks JF!)
Things are bad when even developers don't understand what's going on. So I'll try to clearly explain an important point on the Dev Funding Plan (DFP from now on) for the community: it's completely free. Yet we still get panicked posts saying Please Save Us from the TAX!!! Somebody Help!
You may be for or against the DFP, but either way please at least understand what you're forming an opinion on.
Let's start from the beginning. We know Bitcoin works on blocks and block coin rewards. The block reward, which started at 50 coins per block, and cuts in half approximately every 4 years, serves two purposes: it's a fair way to bring coins into circulation, but more importantly it provides security for the network.
For simplicity, please think of "security" as being measured in power bars. When the network first started, with just Satoshi and Hal Finney, there was 1 power bar. This power bar was made up of the electricity their combined computer hardware used to find blocks. They were the first miners. Bitcoin uses a difficulty level to adjust how hard or easy it is to find blocks. This level is important for a key reason: we want the inflation rate of coins (how fast they come into circulation) to stay about the same, regardless how many miners (computing power) suddenly comes online. If the difficulty is set at super easy, but suddenly a super computer comes online that computer can gobble up thousands of coins in minutes if not seconds, creating massive rapid inflation. So the first thing to understand is that due to the Difficulty Level Adjustment the rate of coins coming into circulation will always stay about the same, regardless how many miners join or leave the network.
Getting back to power bars. So the point of Bitcoin is there is no center, no fixed authority. The problem is we still need a decision made about which chain is valid. This is where proof-of-work comes in. Satoshi's fairly brilliant solution to a consensus decision, with no leader, was to simply look for the longest chain (technically the chain with most hashing work). The reasoning was: as there are far more ordinary people than there are governments and dictators a Bitcoin supported by the all the world's people should always be able to muster more hashrate than even rich governments.
So Bitcoin began and people saw the brilliance: even with a weak power bar level of 1 (a couple computers), Bitcoin was safe from 51% attacks and attacking govs competing for control of the chain because a super low hashrate meant Bitcoin wasn't popular and govs wouldn't bother paying attention. By the time Bitcoin was big enough for govs to worry about attacking it should also have so many participants the power bar level would be far higher, providing strong defense.
Let's say the ideal power bar level is 50,000. At this level no government on earth has enough resources to beat the grassroots network. We hear people brag about how much security BTC has. However, the marketcap for all of BTC is about $160B. Countries like the U.S. and China have GDP measured in many trillions; a trillion is 1,000 billion. Does 160B really seem untouchable? For numeric comparison the main U.S. federal food assistance program cost the government $70B in 2016, representing about 2% of the budget. So the entirety of the BTC market cap is about twice the size of one welfare program, representing 2% of the overall budget. Where should we place the current security power bars if we want guaranteed safety from a determined U.S. gov? If 50,000 is guaranteed safe we're far from it. I'd say BTC is more like 5,000. That's still pretty decent.
Of course, BCH split from BTC... and didn't carry over all the miners and accompanying security. That's not an immediate concern because if BTC isn't on government's radar yet BCH sure isn't. However, that doesn't mean BCH doesn't need security from hostile forces. It's still a valuable network and needs defenses. Where would we put power bars for BCH? If BTC is 5,000 and BCH only has 3% of that hashrate then BCH has just 150. That's it.
How the Developer Funding Plan Works
Back to the DFP. What this says is as a community we agree to break off a piece of the block reward and instead of giving 100% to miners we give a small percent to developers. If each block is 10 coins and the price is $300 then winning a block means winning $3,000. Of course that's not all profit because miners have electricity and other expenses to pay before calculating profit. So if we reduce the portion of the miner reward by 10% so they get just 9 coins per block yet the price stays the same what happens? It means miners receive $2,700 for the same effort. We've just made it more expensive to mine BCH from the point of view of miners. What would any miner then rationally do? Seek profitability elsewhere if available. Suddenly BTC SHA256 hashing looks slightly more attractive so they'll go there. Hashrate leaves BCH and goes to BTC, but the key important point is BOTH chains have a difficulty adjustment algorithm which adjusts to account for rising or lowering miners overall, which keeps the coin inflation rate steady. This means BTC total hashrate rises (more miners compete for BTC) and its Difficulty Level rises accordingly, so the same rate of BTC pumps out; on BCH total hashrate falls (less miners compete for BCH) and its Difficulty falls, so the same rate of BCH pumps out. Inflation remains about the same on both coins so the price of both coins doesn't change any, beyond what it normally does based on news/events etc.
So what difference is there? The difference is total network security. Hashrate totals have changed. BTC gains more miner securing hashrate while BCH loses it. So BTC goes from 5,000 to say 5,100 power bars. BCH goes from about 150 to 140.
Does any of that matter in the grand scheme of things? Not in the slightest. Part of the reason is due to our emergency circumstances with BCH we had to rework our security model. Our primary defense is an idea I came up with, which BitcoinABC implemented, saying it's not sheer hashpower that dictates what chain we follow. We won't replace a chain we're working on if a new one suddenly appears if it means changing more than 10 blocks deep of history. This prevents all the threatening hashrate hanging over our heads from mining a secret chain and creating havoc unleashing it causing 10+ confimed txs to be undone, while exchanges, gambling sites etc. have long since paid out real world money.
Switching $6M worth of block rewards from mining to devs just means we lose a bit of hashrate security, while we gain those funds for development. Nothing more. Nobody holding BCH pays in the form of inflation or any other way. It costs literally NOTHING BECAUSE The block reward is ALREADY ALLOCATED. It will EITHER go 100% to mining security if we do nothing, or go to both miners and devs if the plan is put into effect. Hopefully this helps.
:)
TL;DR: we switch security which we don't really need, for developer funding which we do.
No comments:
Post a Comment