Deep page
Open questions, stated plainly
The questions this site cannot answer from the evidence, kept in the open instead of smoothed over. Each says what is known, what is not, and what evidence would settle it. Checked Nov 4, 2026.
Fee replacement
Known. Fees are a tiny share of miner income today (the claims reference checks the claim). The emission steps down monthly and halves yearly.
Unknown. What share fees must carry in ten years, and whether payment volume rises to meet it.
What would settle it. Fee share of miner income, read from blocks over years: rising toward the emission it must replace, or not.
Ordering fairness
Known. The agreed order is computed the same way by every node from the block web itself.
Unknown. Whether a miner can profitably bend the order of payments it can see coming, and by how much.
What would settle it. Measured ordering advantage for the best-positioned miners across many blocks, against the honest-order baseline.
Privacy and fungibility
Known. Payments are public on the ledger; addresses are pseudonyms, not shields.
Unknown. Whether everyday use leaks enough linkage to make some coins treated as tainted and others clean.
What would settle it. Clustering studies on real payment graphs, and whether exchanges act on them.
Quantum readiness
Known. Signatures in use today are not quantum-safe; KIP-22 is an open proposal, not active (claims reference).
Unknown. The migration path and its deadline: when a quantum machine that matters arrives relative to when the network can switch.
What would settle it. Progress on the proposal plus the state of quantum hardware, read together.
Pruning economics
Known. Pruning keeps a node's disk in laptop range; someone still has to keep the deep history for explorers and late joiners.
Unknown. Who keeps full history at scale, and what they earn for it, once blocks arrive at ten a second for years.
What would settle it. The real cost of archival storage against what archive services charge and earn.
Pool and client concentration
Known. Most mining runs through pools, and most nodes run one implementation; the mining page counts signed blocks live.
Unknown. How concentrated block production and code authorship really are, and what would break if the biggest pool or client failed.
What would settle it. Signed-block shares over time (counted on the mining page) and client diversity counts.
Governance in practice
Known. Upgrades so far arrived as researched proposals (KIPs) adopted by node operators choosing to run them.
Unknown. Whether that process holds under a genuinely contested change, with money on both sides.
What would settle it. The first contested upgrade, observed: who proposes, who objects, what the network does.
Proof cost
Known. Checking everything yourself is the point of a node; the bills are storage and bandwidth (the node page lays them out).
Unknown. Whether the cost of full verification stays in home range as usage grows tenfold and beyond.
What would settle it. Node resource measurements at rising real load, repeated yearly.
Sustained demand
Known. Capacity is not usage: on Nov 4, 2026 the fee estimate showed no queue at any level; blocks were not full (claims reference).
Unknown. Whether usage grows into the capacity, which is the whole bet of building capacity first.
What would settle it. Payments per day and fee pressure over years, from the network itself, not from price charts.
Found a question stated wrong, or evidence that settles one? Suggest a change.