If Bitcoin does wind up securing the value of 8 billion people, it will need an enormous security budget. If miners earned 2 BTC in fees from blocks at $10M, that would mean miners would earn $1 trillion (dollars) per year. This puts Big Bitcoin on the level of the military, the cost of the banking sector, and energy, all trillion dollar industries, and Bitcoin affects spending in all three.
Consider that Bitcoin is a permissionless network anyone with the hardware and energy for it can join, this could be a Proof of Work-driven wealth redistribution. Mining pools are gonna need scaling layers for payouts, they'll have so many smalltime miners. Imagine if every home in the world could get heat that pays them in the same money they work their job in, earning their share of fees from on-chain activities of all sorts.
HVAC is also a multi hundred billion industry, globally. Bullish on HashVAC, bullish on lower Gini coefficient, bullish on price, bullish on small blocks, bullish on layers.
Hold onto your S9s folks. 10 ksats per year might not sound like a lot right now, especially since pools pay on-chain, but if they were streaming sats and each one were worth $.10, that'd be $1k/yr if the hashrate goes up 10x and the price is $10M. Not nothin on the global scheme of things. Bullish on cold places. Not sure how well absorption chillers work with Bitcoin miners, but there might be something there for warm places, too. Bullish on energy, bullish on humanity.
Now, with all that bullish perspective, know what an on-chain transaction costs in this future in dollar terms?
At 200 sats/vB and $10M BTC, that's $3600 for a channel splice like the kind Phoenix wallet does, which will likely be the most common monetary transaction type on-chain.
We would have to make blocks a thousand times bigger, with the chain growing 100 terabytes per year, to make them cost $3.60, and it'd be questionable if miners will make the same in fees, so raising the block size has never been incentive compatible with miners, and so that won't happen. And the economic nodes are the ones run by degens. So, that whole question is moot. There won't be a Block Size War II, because there is no threat of that changing.
Instead, as responsible adults, we will need to get used to the fact that all the things we like about how we use Bitcoin will change as it grows. The simple mental models will eventually stop working as they don't scale. As sure as a parent comes to terms with how their child grows, how we use and think of Bitcoin will need to change for it to grow. Happy quince, Bitcóin.
