RE: Taxes destroy all of us rich or poor
W.r.t the above, I was under the impression that both the block reward and transaction fees were locked into the Coinbase transaction of the next block, not spendable for about 100+ confirmations or so (not sure I remember this exactly right). Once the block reward is gone or becomes less incentives significant than transaction fees, wouldn't extension of the amount of time for collection fix such gaming of the system? It's been about 9 months or so since I referenced Mastering Bitcoin by Andreas Antonopoulos (now I believe you have to pay on one of the sites to access it).
The idea here is if you have a period of say 2 weeks to a month that by the time you cash out your forked version of the rewards, bitcoin's value has gone to zero and there's nothing to collect because the Nash equilibrium here would be the expectation that everyone else would do the same (am I using Nash right?). I would think this would disincentivise forking.
If I am not mistaken, you’re proposing that by locking up the transaction fees earned for the standard 600 blocks, same as is already the case for the coinbase minted rewards, then you posit no one would want to cheat because the system would not converge on consensus (or confirmations would become very slow) and everyone would lose their value.
But that is refuted in the research paper. Even Vitalik wrote about how about altruism-prime is an undersupplied public good. I refer you to Vitalik’s explanation. IOW, if you do not cheat, the others will, so you also have to cheat. There’s no Nash Equilibrium, which is precisely the point. I believe that is a Prisoner’s dilemma. Everyone must defect, which is also what has happened to Steem’s reward system.
I like this explanation of Nash Equilibrium.
I agree that people cheat sometimes. Therefore, we shouldn't just hope that people stop cheating systems.