Conclusions and Summary

What Does This Mean for Bitcoin?

Significantly Increased Adoption

For comparison, Paypal handles around 285 transactions per second (tps), VISA handles around 2000tps and the total global non-cash transactions are around 12,400tps.

Currently bitcoin is capable of handling a maximum of around 3.5 transactions every second which are published to the blockchain roughly every 10 minutes. With Seg Wit implemented via a hardfork, bitcoin will be capable or around 7tps. With this proposal bitcoin will be capable of handling more transactions than Paypal (assuming Paypal experiences growth of around 7% per year) in the year 2027. Bitcoin will overtake VISA’s transaction capability by the year 2035 and at the end of the growth cycle in 2039 it will be able to handle close to 50% of the total global non-cash transactions.

When you add on top second layer protocols( like the LN), sidechains, altcoins and off-chain transactions, there should be more than enough capacity for the whole world and every possible conceivable use for digital value transfer.

Transitioning from a Subsidy to a Transaction Fee Model

Currently mining is mostly incentivised by the subsidy that is given by the network (currently 25btc per block). If bitcoin is to widely successful it is likely that price increases will continue to outweigh btc denominated subsidy decreases for some time. This means that currently it is likely to be impossible to try to force the network into matching a significant portion of the subsidy with fees. The amount of fees being paid to miners has averagely increased over time and look like they will continue to do so. It is likely that the optimal time for fees to start seriously replacing the subsidy is when bitcoin adoption starts to slow. Unless you take a pessimistic view of bitcoin (thinking bitcoin is as big as it ever will be), it is reasonable to assume this will not happen for some time.

With this proposal, using an average fee of just $0.05, total transaction fees per day would be:

  • Year 2020 = $90,720
  • Year 2025 = $483,840.00
  • Year 2030 = $2,903,040.00
  • Year 2035 = $15,482,880.00
  • Year 2041 = $123,863,040.00 (full 8GB Blocks)

Miners currently earn a total of around $2 million dollars per day in revenue, significantly less than the $124 million dollars in transaction fee revenue possible using this proposal. That also doesn’t include the subsidy which would still play some role until the year 2140. This transaction fee revenue would be a yearly revenue of $45 billion for miners when transaction fees are only $0.05 on average.

Proposal Data

You can use these two spreadsheets (1 - 2 ) to see the various metrics at play over time. The first spreadsheet shows the data using the predicted trends and the second spreadsheet shows the data with the worst case trends.

Summary

It’s very clear we are on the edge/midst of a community (and possibly a network) split. This is a very dangerous situation for bitcoin. A huge divide has appeared in the community and opinions are becoming more and more entrenched on both sides. If we cannot come together and find a way forward it will be bad for everyone except bitcoin’s competition and enemies. While this proposal is born from an attempt at finding a balance based on as many relevant factors as possible, it also fortunately happens to fall in between the two sides of the debate. Hopefully the community can see this proposal as a way of making a compromise, releasing the entrenchment and finding a way forward to scale bitcoin. I have no doubt that if we can do this, bitcoin will have enormous success in the years to come.