Hot take: The Bitcoin security budget sustainability fud is largely overblown BTC doesn’t need long tail emission and no canonical version of BTC will ever go beyond the 21M hardcap supply Why? TL;DR: Miners don’t control the chain, they have a very limited set of powers — Miners cannot: 1) Spend coins from an address for which they don’t have the corresponding private key 2) Change the protocol’s rules, such as breaking the 21M hard cap supply or raise blocksize Miners can: 1) Censor transactions in the blocks they produce (but can’t censor transactions in blocks they don’t produce without forking the chain) 2) Reorg the chain and engage in double spend attacks on blocks without sufficient confirmation depth Therefore, even in the worst case scenario of a temporary 51% attack, the chain is not irrevocably destroyed, rather L1 users need to wait for additional confirmations as the chain stabilizes Practically speaking, some entities that don’t wait enough confirmations get double spent on and there’s some fud on social media, but nothing fundamentally changes about the asset or its use on other networks/systems The reason miners have limited power is that full nodes hold them accountable by tossing invalid blocks, creating a checks and balances systems More specifically, key economic actors who run full nodes (e.g., exchanges, ETFs, RPCs, bridges, oracles, whales, devs, etc) will reject any version of the chain that does not follow the protocol rules their local node follows (you can do this too!) Miners do need to be compensated for the work they do (packaging txs in blocks), but the amount of capital needed is likely over exaggerated due to the large size of block rewards historically At it stands, Bitcoin is likely “overpaying” for security, but this is primarily because the block reward is also used as a distribution mechanism for newly minted coins, on a predetermined schedule Bitcoin likely only needs a moderate amount of fees to secure block production, and it’s becoming increasingly likely that L2s (zkRollups designs, not Lightning) will fill this role BTC’s valuation does not depend on fee revenue generation as those fees go to miners, not BTC holders (this is a feature of commodity money; not a bug) Fee accrual via L2s or otherwise is not guaranteed for Bitcoin by any means, but the amount of fud this topic receives is way out of sync compared it’s actual impact or likelihood of occurring It’s the primary excuse ETH maxis use when dismissing BTC, but it’s a bit like complaining about someone’s car not having a spare tire, while your car has a blown head gasket What should be discussed more imo is quantum computing and how Bitcoin will handle people someone cracking the Satoshi private keys decades down the line, as that is a real (albeit very future) risk