[bitcoin-dev] Reducing block reward via soft fork

[Karl]

>> The turn-around time for that takes a population of both users and
>> miners to cause. Increasing popularity of bitcoin has a far bigger
>> impact here, and it is already raising fees and energy use at an
>> established rate.
>>
>> If it becomes an issue, as bandwidth increases block size could be
>> raised to lower fees.
>>
>
> Which increases block rewards somewhat (at least to some level that matches
> the overall security of the network) and you still have the same amount of
> energy consumed.

If you mean to implicitly propose that even if halved all the way with
very large blocks, block rewards would just increase to the same
level, meaning that any attempt to decrease them has no effect, I
disagree.    I expect that if you raise the block size, eventually
there is so much supply for transactions that there are no fees at all
(nor security).  The numbers are all things the devs, miners, and
users can together control.

> How to prove this is not happening?
> The best you can do is to have some number of authorities sign off on
> whether or not they are doing this.
> The problem is that authorities are bribeable.

You could make the proof of work be a proof of environmental kindness
by coding incentives for people to place and verify proof on the
chain, and then rewarding people for acting on it as desired.  You
could code the chain to pay people to investigate and prove miners'
business practices, for example.  You could define the main chain as
one where everyone consents the proofs are valid.  There are a lot of
issues to resolve and it would be a very different chain.

There is not a single solution here.  There are innumerable possible
solutions, any one of which could be made to work with enough brains
working on it.  To use one, we need to agree on what kinds of
solutions are acceptable.

> Alternately, other entities in the locality can use force to require the
> polluting entity to clean up or suffer significant consequences.
> This at least is better incentive-wise, as they others in the same locality
> are the ones most affected, but the ability to enforce may be difficult due
> to various political constructions; the miners could be in such deep cahoots
> with the local government that the local government would willingly hurt
> other local entities in the vicinity of the polluting entity.

As bitcoin grows, if people ask some locality to enforce behavior,
they may need to be willing to enforce it themselves, too, or they
might outcompete the locality.