Why would a small radio station plan for the day its founding grant runs out?
Say a town station started with a grant that pays the DJs, and the grant gets cut in half every four years. Today it covers almost everything. In twenty years it covers very little. Listener donations have to grow into that gap, or the station goes quiet.
Bitcoin works the same way. Miners run the machines that keep the ledger honest, and hashrate is the total computing power they point at the network. Each new block pays them two things. The subsidy is new bitcoin created by the protocol. Fees are what you pay to get your transaction into that block. The subsidy halves about every four years. That schedule is written into the code and nobody gets a vote on it.
So the question I keep asking is who pays the miners once the subsidy is small. My answer is fees, from people who need a final, settled payment and will pay for a spot in a block.
The case against me: fees are a small slice of what miners earn today, and many payments have moved to layers like Lightning that touch the chain only now and then. If fees stay small, fewer miners can afford to run, and the network gets cheaper to attack.
I take that seriously, and I could be wrong. If several halvings pass and fees still cover a tiny share of miner income while hashrate falls, the fee market did not grow up in time.
For now I watch the fee share of each block more closely than any headline.
If the radio station made the subsidy click, Zap ⚡
