Adam Back vs $NAT

Top to top, the cycle multiples have fallen every cycle since 2013. 2025 was the first top under the 2× the halving math needs. But suppose the trend reverses. The bull-case scene grants the Power-Law price in full, and security's share of Bitcoin's value still decays toward ~0.006%. A higher price does not buy more security. It raises the value the thinning budget must defend.

These deserve to be taken seriously: they are real proposals from serious people. All three shape how fee income arrives. None of them adds a satoshi to what miners are paid. Anti-sniping and reward averaging redistribute the same thin fees. Hardware rules pay nobody. The question they leave untouched is the level: fees' usable best is about 0.04% of Bitcoin's value per year, 22× under today's ~0.82%. Smoothing a budget is not funding one.

“Premature” is a claim about the calendar, not the math. The subsidy halves on a schedule that has been in the code since 2009, and it ends at zero. The strongest version of his position is not “there is no problem.” It is: the problem is old news and the mitigations are ready. The two scenes above test exactly that, and the mitigations never touch revenue. Drag the year slider and pick your own definition of premature.

“Presumably” and “perhaps” are priors, not findings. And the prior is reasonable: it fits thousands of altcoins. Early participants accumulated cheaply. So did early Bitcoin miners. The difference between a premine and an early adopter is whether the rule was the same for everyone. Here it was, and the chain is public. Check whether the prior fits this one.