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0 pointsdanuker4y ago0 comments

Transaction fees are not just proportional to usage. They are a price set by demand (usage) and supply (block space).

Currently Bitcoin limiting the block size to 1MB is artificially lowering supply.

Recently, Bitcoin Cash has surpassed Bitcoin in transactions per day: https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/transactions-btc-bch.ht...

Their blocks are larger, so there is more room for transactions, so miners are not so well rewarded, so they can afford to waste less electricity in total.

Of course, this reduced waste implies reduced security (instead of securing >$700k/h, it's "only" $8.5k/h - https://www.crypto51.app/).

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incrudible4y ago

What I'm trying to get at is that all of these factors matter, not just one of these factors in isolation. Ethereum also has larger block size over time, and I'm sure it processes far more transactions than Bitcoin.

Suppose that Bitcoin Cash were to increase in price ten-fold, then logically it would make economic sense to burn ten times as much energy to mine it, no matter how many transactions are processed.

danukerOP4y ago

You are right. I suppose a fair target to tune would be the cost-of-51%-attack instead of an arbitrary block size or percent fees.

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