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Comment by greyface- | Hacker News Reader

> Its all about blockspace

> That was true when bitcoin was 2 cents

I largely agree with you, but to nitpick: when bitcoin was 2 cents, blockspace was free, and miners regularly accepted zero-fee transactions into blocks. Today, you're not getting a transaction into a block without paying at least a couple hundred sats. Your statement is true today, but it wasn't like this until April-May 2012 when Satoshi Dice started filling blocks up. See Fig 3 on page 9 of <https://maltemoeser.de/paper/transaction-fees.pdf> or look through some early blocks.

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yes, blocks are and were periodically empty

if you expected applications to be deployed that would take up block space when used, and were going to build those applications yourself, then it was still rational

in 2012 people were describing smart contracts, joint custody accounts to secure assets better, and many other applications that are commonplace and have their own critique and discussion now

its like seeing an island full of resources and realizing that the bridges and ferry routes haven't been built yet. that

1) you can get to that island yourself before everyone else

2) you can also build the bridge and put up a toll booth

3) other bridges will be built

4) and other people can also come to the island early at great difficulty too

the same play is still true on other blockchains, and sometimes back again on bitcoin

I’ve done the trade many times over the past 15 years

Today, when blocks are empty, you're paying 1 sat/vB. Back then, when blocks were empty, you paid zero. That's the difference between "all about blockspace" and "only about blockspace when you care about next-block latency".

Here's a 2010 Satoshi post in a thread about transaction fees stating "we should always allow at least some free transactions": https://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/posts/bitcointalk/thre...

If you had said "2 dollars" instead of "2 cents", we would be in complete agreement. All I'm saying is that mandatory transaction fees were not baked in at 2 cents.

and all I’m saying is that it didn’t matter for a bullish thesis whether this is just a nitpick fyi or a nuance you really care about

the only thing that mattered was the malleability of the system to meet its goal of attracting transactions, including the future malleability of what you are pointing out. blockspace became scarce. it was predictable that anything that undermined that would be excised out of the network.

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