[NathanCH]

> Bitcoin has an artificial transaction cap because it's conservative. It's been raised before and will be raised in the future.

I thought one of the founding principles is that new money will not be created?

Unrelated to your comment, but re: #3 and #5 ...why shouldn't Bitcoin's value be the cost to mine it?

[esotericn]

I'm confused by your first comment; the transactional throughput of Bitcoin is completely unrelated to money creation.

On the latter - I think it's more up to you to show that it would be. The value of most things is unlinked from their cost of production. A really obvious example would be a five pound note.

That said, yes, in the stable state, miners should only expend 1BTC-epsilon of 'effort' to produce 1BTC. So if a block contains 1BTC of transaction fees, you'd expect them to spend a maximum of 1BTC (currently ~$6000 USD) to produce a block.

In reality it's a bit more complicated than that because the value fluctuates far more quickly than mining operations can or will scale up or down.

So really, it's the opposite - 1BTC isn't worth the amount of effort miners put in, the amount of effort miners put in should be approximately 1BTC worth. Sort of.

[betterunix2]

Imagine that I am trying to convince you to buy some cookies I baked. Are you going to care about the effort I put into making the cookies when I ask you to pay me for them?

[ghayes]

How are the `transaction cap` and `new money will not be created` related? A block can contain more transactions, but the block reward stays the same.

Also, new bitcoin is created all the time (since that's what mining is).