Stamble upon interesting thoughts regarding bitcoin design. If it designed in a way that each 4 years payment to miners for network security decreases, did creators of bitcoin think of it as get rich quick scheme? Its like you have a tree and you water it less as it grows. Sounds not sustainable at all. PS arguments like later it supposed to be fees, not counting since cut is real and “later” is hypothetical.
As far as I know the fees are determined by the market, the only thing that decreases is the reward for finding a block. I believe the reasoning about it is to have a limited amount of bitcoins in circulation. If there was no cap on supply then the value of Bitcoin would crumble as essentially in the long term the miners could “print” or “mine” infinitely many of it.
Miners are still though incentivized to keep the security of the network as long as there is demand for transaction. Everytime you put out a transaction on the blockchain you pay a small fee to the miners. The higher the fee the shorter you will have to wait for the bitcoins to be transferred as more miners will be incentivized to put your transaction on the blockchain while mining.
So the reasoning about the whole system is: make at first Bitcoin scarce to encourage mining and as more and more people own the cryptocurrency the more mining will shift from creating Bitcoins out of nowhere to getting money from the transaction fees. At least that’s how I understand it.
in order to make it more scarce they decided to incentivize miners less each 4 years
The perfect network maintains itself only with the fees. The reward was there initially only because we needed a way to distribute all the wealth as equally as possible among all citizens of the world. Everyone was given the chance to get their share
