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Comment by idiotsecant | Hacker News Reader

That's not at all relevant to parent post's point. BTC mining is famously centralized, and continues to get more so. It is inevitable that a manufacturer of BTC asics with access to cheap power will become large enough to control 51% of the hash. It's inevitable. It's bad system design - it makes being able to manufacture your own custom silicon table stakes to run a financial system for some reason.

BTC will have to move to a proof of stake design to survive. It's unavoidable.

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That is debatable, but also besides anything else, changing to PoS means changing the tokenomics (some tail emission for staking rewards, no 21m hard cap), which means it's incredibly unlikely to happen

why would staking rewards be any more necessary than mining rewards?

In the end state (after ~2140), mining rewards just come from TX fees. But true, it is possible you could just redistribute TX fees to stakers.

Post-merge ethereum is designed so that the gas fees and the staking rewards roughly cancel out on balance (so overall inflation is around zero), but they are decoupled so even if nobody is using the network you still get a staking yield

>so overall inflation is around zero

Pedantic point: monetary inflation is around zero, not necessarily price inflation (which is what people typically mean when they just say "inflation").

Yes sorry, important clarification.

In theory if the entire world was on an ethereum standard with a steady state population, price inflation would also average out to zero

BTC can't move to proof of stake because religious zealots would keep their money in the old fork.

It's doomed in general, see the cash fork.

Tokenized bitcoin.

> It is inevitable that a manufacturer of BTC asics with access to cheap power will become large enough to control 51% of the hash

The ASIC manufacturer would also need a backdoor. ASIC manufacturers don't control mining.

Large miners are unlikely to allow backdoors into their mining network.

ASIC miners often do control mining. They often mine with chips before they drop them in the public market

I think they mean the manufacturer would just keep most of the stock for themselves. Reminds me of that famous Scarface quote: "You should get high on your own supply, it's a great idea that won't end horribly."

>ASIC manufacturers don't control mining.

I dont think you understand the BTC mining ecosystem

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