Bitcoin Forum

Just a newb question, what happens when the 21 million coins gets mined out. What will keep the blockchain moving after this point and just to confirm there will never be more then 21 million coins?

Transaction fees Will be the mining reward. High use of the bitcoin network Will be required to adequately pay the miners. On the other hand, You Will probably not live by that Time anymore, so You dont need to worry too much.

So the mining power thrown at bitcoin will be radically reduced at that point but it won't matter as 51% attacks would be useless since no new coins will be produced.

no,
never radically because coin mining deacrease slowly...and the market will regulate all the existing coins...

Thanks for the answers so far. what do you mean by regulate all the existing coins... , will there be certain transaction fees incurred for just holding bitcoin that miners will get to keep things moving along or will it purely be on transaction fees on when you transfer coins for whatever purpose?

I plan to pass some coins to my kids, so I know this will be something they will have to deal with in there lifetime.

You 'might' be jumping the gun a bit, Bitcoin won't be mined out for another 125 years!  I don't know what life expectancy is now, but 125 seems optimistic!

A long long time before we get to that point, Bitcoin will either be globally used, or not be used at all.  If it is the internet currency, then people will mine for transaction fees, and they cann be pretty big and worth mining for.  If not, then people will turn off and the difficulty will fall greatly.

We will see at the next halving what happens, a more extreme version can be expected when the jump is from 1 to 0 per mined block.

The threat of a 51% attack has to do with the ability to double spend coins you already have and not the coins being paid as a reward for the mining being done.
If it was possible to succeed and to maintain a 51% attack, you could spend the coins you own at one place and spend the same coins at another place. This is not a option, because the cost of maintaining a 51% attack, out weigh the benefits from doing it.

i dont care about it because we are not gonna live in that era, but as we know if 21 millions have been mined of course its price gonna deflate, so all we have to do just keep earn some profit from it and always using bitcoin and spread positive issues about bitcoin to all of the world :D

Mining power will not reduce if the price of bitcoin is high and transaction fee is high. 51% is always a worry regardless of new coin minting.

It will just be the transaction fees that we pay which will keep the network running and be awarded.

Since the supply will be much lower at that time, the price will increase tremendously. With the technological improvements in years from now till then, ASICs will be much more efficient and electricity will be cheap enough due to renew-ability. The block size increase will essentially increase the transaction fees thus making it more profitable.

When 21 million coins have been mined, I will have been long dead, so I don't care ;)

By then besides us being dead, 1 BTC will be something ridiculous like 100 million current USD dollars, which means the small BTC made from mining will still be profitable, well it will not be really mining, it will just be transaction processing.

this would be the point where bitcoin will have to prove its survivability, i mean if the price will not be high enough to sustain the network, no one will mine anymore, therefore the network will collapse and bitcoin will die

otherwise bitcoin will reach an astronomic value that will make everyone happy

right, so if bitcoin is still around by the time 21 million have been mined, it will be because mass adoption has been reached and the value is high enough to make transaction processing a profitable business

After they improve life expectancy there will be a lot of 120 year old millionaires traveling to Mars.

it is a long way from today but when all the bitcoin have been mined which means that block rewards become so small, then i guess there will be two scenarios:
1) bitcoin price is at a stage that it makes mining profitable or mining becomes so cheep that it doesn't matter and doesn't cost anything. then bitcoin will continue the way it is
2) the only way i can see that bitcoin can survive is that the fees are increased.

after reaching 21 mil. btc the miners only work for earning tx fees.may be fees can goes up.

If fees goes up, what will happen to btc usage? Peoples will again move to fiat?
And if miners work for earning tx fees, then no need of big mining rigs?


~Rude Boy

then we can say that btc technology is just for some time.

According to Jon Matonis (former Bitcoin Foundation Executive Director) we might not even need/have a 21 million coin cap ... https://twitter.com/jonmatonis/status/611844197331693568 :D

Also, here: https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/jon-matonis-believes-increased-bitcoin-block-size-will-lead-increased-mining-reward/

In theory there could be a hardfork for that but the price would decrease accordingly and it would have severe negative consequences for trust in bitcoin. Why do you think there is so little change in bitcoin while there are so many changes in altcoins, and especially in those new shiny ones. Just because of that. I doubt serious investors would feel comfortable in having assets with constantly varying fundamental properties..

Has anyone thought about  Proof of stake would be the best way to go after the 21m are mining, lol the miners would go crazy tonz of machines just going to the dump.

Going with the assumption that there will be breakthroughs in mining tech, it still seems highly unlikely to be able to live long enough to witness the volume increasing to 21 Million. So, yeah, shouldn't be a cause of concern.

Completely agree.

Even after 21 million bitcoin are mined, the blockchain will keep going along and recording transactions, as you suggest in your question. It will then rely on transaction fees as has been said multiple times already, but the nature of transaction fees will be different at that point. These fees will need to incentivize people to keep mining, for some to keep running full nodes, and to keep the system running.

When what a can miner can get himself or herself in the coinbase transaction of a block is not enough to motivate them, then they will start looking for higher transaction fees. I suppose transaction fees will be much higher then.

Since it is so far off, it's really all speculation right now. I wouldn't worry much about it. If your kids are trying to use bitcoins you're getting now, I imagine those would be pretty valuable.

Please give me half a million of those when 21 millions have been mined  ;D I thought the number should have been well over 50 million or so.

proof of stake isn't fair. exchanges always benefit. it's not a good idea to mess with the 21m coin cap. it's something that must never be changed.

When bitcoin is the only coin left, there will be no currency exchanges. However, if you want to buy stocks/shares in a brokerage, you have to store memory there, then those entities will earn PoS interest.

nah, having a much greater number would only delay the success of bitcoin, in the worst case scenario, where adoption will not raise by much and we will grow because of less supply dumped each day

actually it should have been lower, but when satoshi thought about the correct number, He also took into account the coins that will be lost

We will all be long dead.

once all coins have been mined, the price will go up, ie supply and demand

chose 50BTC as a block reward and then chose to cut that reward in half every 210,000 blocks.  If you do the math, that just happens to work out to a bit less than 21 million (20999999.97690000 to be exact).

don't worry about when all the coins are theoretically mined (2140).  worry about when most of the coins have already been mined (2024).

How are people so sure that the price per bitcoin will be so great? There's not analysis that say this is likely to happen, right? If so, can someone share it with me? PM me...seriously, I'd love to read it!

Although we know the price might increase a lot after mining reward halving or 0 block reward, but no one can definitely predict the price in the future. As an investor, we only can invest what we can afford to lose!

Why do you think only bitcoin will be left? To my knowledge the number of coins are only increasing faster and faster. If there are no alts and bitcoin worth a fortune we might have a situation where 1 satoshi is too much for certain things... Altcoins could fit this role pretty well I think..

it's a bit hard for 1 satoshi to become "too much in value", essentially we are talking about 1 satoshi 1 dollar or more, which mean an unbelievable market cap, chances are very slim that something like this could be ever achieved

so altcoin will remain useless, we really do not need to replicate the amount of different fiat in circulation, with different crypto coin

Stabilized will be more like it. We will reach an equilibrium stage where there will be only a few mining operations.
The 51% attack has nothing to do with mining new coins other than the fact that using that much power for mining coins would be profitable.
It has to do with double spends of coins the attacker already owns and to prevent other users from making a transaction.

Also, as Norris pointed out, the transaction fees will be the only reward for the miners by that time.
But you can expect the transaction fee rewards to be huge since by that time Bitcoin will be globally accepted and widespread.

51% attack doesn't prevents other users from making a transaction. It can only prevent other user's transaction to be gaining confirmations, prevent other miners from mining valid blocks.

Still a long way to go before all 21 million coins are mined. In any case, once the limit has been reached, transaction fees should keep the network going.

your scenario is perfect but there is "if", if the bitcion's price is enough to satisfy the miner. When the 20M blocksize increase is implemented, What is the maximum fee collected by the miners? If 1K is charged with 0.0001 BTC, 20M can have 20,480K's transaction volume and can yield 2.048 BTC  earning for each block. It is just the best scenario that miners can get 2.048 BTC for each block if the block reward don't increase after 21 million coins have been mined. The price of bitcoin at that time is important factor.

Don't forget that a portion of the block is reserved for the free transaction and the actual earning may be much lower. The pool can easily set a minimum fee to add the transaction into the block too but there's no point. Given that there are no more new coins generated, the supply of Bitcoins could be very low while the demand is very high if it goes mainstream. There are other factors such as electrical fees, equipment cost etc to consider about. The operating cost may be much much lower than what you think.

I'm sure many bitcoins are sleeping on accounts and will never wake up and die for ever with their owners...

So will our great great great great great grandchildren be protesting about immoral mining fees and calling for miners to be regulated?

While we try to answer the question, there are still many uncertainties at this point. Whether transaction fee will be enough to take over and become the standard network fee, it is probably is just a representation of the actual scenario of what we would like to have. I won't be around to see it but for me, I believe depending on the condition during that time, there's always options and workaround which can be implemented to change it.  

How can miners be regulated? They will just turn off miners if not profitable and say goodbye. And what then? End of BTC? Miners keep this coin alive and their efforts must be rewarded. Use altcoins if you're sending dust amounts and complain about high fees :P

Mining can't be regulated unless you are thinking of having majority of the miners excluding transactions from a certain address. I don't think paying a 0.00001 or even 0.001 BTC fee is immortal at all. In fact, I feel that it is a reasonably cheap fee in exchange for transparency, anonymity and reversibility. With increment of block size, the amount of fee per block would be significantly larger.

Yes. With a maximum of 21 million bitcoins that can be mined, just imagine IF huge websites such as Amazon or eBay started to use them...21 million isn't even 1% of America's population! It will become very scarce eventually and 21 million is really a small number.

no it does not work in that way, the whole network will never shut down, because the value will be always greater than zero, thus making mining activity always worth it, in the worst case it would reduce by a lot but noithing more

see how there are still died coins with a minimal network that is working, and they are nothing to bitcoin

That is why each Bitcoin can be split into 8 decimals. You can easily make 1 satoshi $1 but that would not be very realistic. More decimal place can be added if needed.

I was talking in the sense that in the future miners require fees that are deemed extortionate to the average joe. Could this happen? Would miners have any say over the fees required once all bitcoins are mined?

But to use it as a currency, and to make crypto-currencies competitive with the fiat currency, shouldn't it be much more?

from Bitcoin wiki

agree .actually there are too few bitcoin in existence, when the mass adoption will be complete you will see 21M is a low amount for 7 Billions of peoples

they might not have a say but they most definitely have influence on the amount of fee. they can include only high fees, exclude low fees. or they can even turn their machines off if it is not profitable for them.

not really, bitcoin is divisibile up to 8 decimal digits, the bitcoin value will rise as a consequence, if there will be a great adoption , and therefore 0.01(for example) will be worth what one bitcoin is worth now

so we don't really need a higher cap, but only more people using it

Unless they control 30%++ of the network, their own rules won't really affect Bitcoin much. It would be a bad move to include only high fees. They can easily accept all the fees and have much more profit than accepting only high fees.

With only 21 million BTC, it's not hard to predict that owning 1 BTC would be extremely hard and the decimal places will start to matter more and more.

A good advise to be to spread more happy knowledge about bitcoin so more people adopt bitcoin and more bitcoin gets in, because if all these coins are ever mined, the price will just deflate and the market will crash.

We should encourage more people to explore what bitcoin is rather than just tell them why it is cool and how is it good. Let them research that shit, they will definitely come back interested.
If all coins are mined, a huge market crash will happen but it is always something which can be stopped. Not inevitable.

if all coins are mined than nothing will happen...why should something change?

they will continue to mine for the fee, that hopefully will have a good value, otherwise miners will not keep mining, and the network will die

so the point isn't to have more coins, but to have a better value on those few that we already have

i suggest you check iX coin out - all 21 million have been mined

Miners will never stop to mine...because the fees are divided among the miners...and if less miners mine...then the interest grows.
It is exactly the principle of my faucet...it can never collapse or die because it is regulated by the market.
Of course my faucet can die for other reasons,but bitcoin system cannot so long few users fixe fees.
They are not the miners who fix the fees,but the senders...

I wish people will turn off and the difficulty will fall greatly right now that way i could make some btc to pay off my rigs and power. Right now btc ain't worth mining.

if the miners activity drop too much, there is a non return point, that can be matched and maybe even if bitcoin will survive, it will be so damaged that can only serve a tiny market

remember that the network hash cannot drop too much, otherwise various attack could be performed much more easily

all is only supposition.
Let's work the market and basta.

The only possible scenario for difficulty to come down is if BTC price drops to <$10 again and as the reult most miners walk away and get real jobs.

and right now, since that price range is impossible and most probably it is going to go higher, miners are going to continue mining.

Mining will always exist. Even after Bitcoin is fully mined, new blocks will continue to be added to the blockchain roughly every 10 minutes or so by miners. However, their income would come from transaction fees instead of new coins. Just like today though, miners who have more hashpower will solve more blocks than miners with less hashpower.

Currently, the block reward is 25 BTC plus a few extra BTC from transaction fees. Not too long ago it was 50 BTC plus fees. Sometime in 2016, this will be reduced to 12.5 BTC plus fees. Then it will be 6.25 BTC plus fees, then 3.125 BTC plus fees, and so on.





Long before Bitcoin is fully mined out, the rewards from newly generated coins will become irrelevant due to the effect of successive block halvings. By 2040, the block reward will be less than 0.2 BTC plus fees. By 2070, it will be less than 0.001 BTC plus fees:

http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply


Or Premine (PMC). Premine was an experiment to see what the Bitcoin economy might look like in the future after successive block halvings result in no more new coins being mined and to see whether or not the model of mining for transaction fees instead is sustainable:


Unfortunately, the results of that experiment were pretty disappointing. (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=427519.msg8411756#msg8411756)


Actually the difficulty has dropped several times in the past and especially from December 2014 onwards (http://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-price-decline-sparks-rare-mining-difficulty-drop/) - although usually not by a lot. Looking at the chart below, it seems to have been going nearly sideways for the past four months:

http://blockchain.info/charts/difficulty

After all 21 million coins are mined then the miners will be getting transaction fees instead of block rewards... Interesting, does that mean currently the transaction fees are also being sent to the miners, even though they are also receiving block rewards?

that's very confusing yes. Apparently the fee is to give incentive to the miners to include your transaction within the next block that is solved.

However when 21 million coins have been mined the price of btc would be quite big. That won't happen until a hundred years or so from now though.

Yup. For instance, here is an example:

http://blockchain.info/tx/6d2a6bb38baeed1772b3d9b46fa6f3144c9a4d1a2f63f823904d9eeae4b5d407

Notice that the miner recieved 25.10083013 BTC rather than a nice round 25 BTC. That extra 0.10083013 BTC is the sum of all the transaction fees included in that block.

Technically This's not gonna happen.

20,999,839.77085749 is the upper limit. ;D

Wow, yeah, it will take a long time before the 21 million coins are mined. I believe that will happen somewhere around or even in the year 2140? The last reward will be 1 satoshi as well. I did not know that before, hopefully by the year 2140, there will be many transactions taking place to make it worth while for the miners to keep mining.

Oh, that makes a lot of sense. Thank you for the clarification. Previously, I was under the impression that transaction fees were basically destroyed, as a way of deflation. It appears as if that is not the case, thanks again.

Although Bitcoin has its transaction fees go to miners, what you're describing is true for some altcoins like Peercoin (PPC) where transaction fees aren't earned by miners but are instead destroyed. For PPC, this is done to offset the inflation caused by proof-of-stake minting:


Link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peercoin#Transaction_fees

yeah, i know.
i meant that in order for the difficulty to drop a considerable amount that can let individuals with their mining rigs start mining bitcoin and the process becomes profitable, is the price to fall that low and a great number of miners turn their equipment off.

We don't know what will be happened. It's still a long time until 21 million coins will be mined. In my speculation, there are no new coins, transaction fees will be the mining reward.

actually  i don't think it will change much after 20M coins will be mined which isn't too far away, so better to wait for that phase, instead of wasting time about clueless speculation

the market after 2024 need to absorbs a very few amount of coin, so the price will be already settled, i'm not expecting a major rise only because 1M are still to be mined...

Mining would continue to confirm transactions and miners would be rewarded by transaction fees.

This. There's still a lot of time to reach 21 million coins but we can predict that Bitcoin price will be a lot greater than today's price. That would be enough money for miners to stay open and confirm transactions.

Isn't too far away? lol, considering the total supply will be mined at about 2140, it is really far away, will be even alive by then? that feels like a lifetime to me, im not really that bothered about things that i'll not really get to live. The people that is alive by then will have to deal with those. I trust the geniuses coding BTC now have a good long term vision so the system keeps working flawless after 100+ years.

This, when the price will be for example at 100.000 Dollar,
than there will be still miner for the last bitcoins.

The timeline that all coins are mined until 2150 or something can't be taken seriously in my opinion. We got moore's law, we got the human error related to forks and other elements like "cryptocurrency natural selection". However, if things continue like this, and intelligent decisions are made by the code authorities then bitcoin should rise and rise.

In any matter, bitcoin will go down in history as the kickstart of a paradigm shift. Few days ago I read that quote, dont remember where I got it from but it went like this: "In the old age we had unlimited money, but limited media. In the new age we got limited money and unlimited media. The right way around."

i was speaking about when the 20M will kick in not the 21M, i thought it was clear enough, will be around 2024, only 8-9 years, at that point the halving impact on the market will be meaningless

We all know that, what we are trying to discuss is, what sort of fees will the mining guys of the future be getting? thats the interesting part to me. I guess by that time 1 coin will have the purchasing power of something ridiculous like 10 million dollars, so tiny fees will be enough to make a living out of procesing txs.

But ... do the costs really outweigh it?

Sure, the costs of doing a 51 attack could be used for higher profit mining instead.

That, however, seems to be a very limited analysis. For example, what if some major banks, or even countries' federal banking systems get together and figure out that they can save 'their' systems by doing this? Then they have much more to win, than just what is directly related to the question of where to use the computing power.

As I understand it, the system will only be very temporarily in trouble and therefore it might not really make much of a dent.. but at least I think it is important to include such other objectives of a 51 attack... because more might be earned than only what is directly related to the use of computing power.

the reaching of 21 million coins is so slow,that we will not see the change of someting.

When/after bitcion is 51% attacked, a new coin will appear and resistant to 51%. The hashing algorithm can be changed. Or a proof of deposit will be more popular. The miner has to have some coins as a deposit before they mine, otherwise, the difficulty will be higher and there will be fewer mined coins.

I guess the market will determine the price. If it is troo low there will not be enough miners so price goes up... as the price goes up more and more miners come in until either balance or too many. If there are too many prices go down and some drop off until balance or too few.... if too few prices go up and more come in until balance or too many...

And so on..

Or... the entire cryptocurrency venture will be deemed a dead-end experiment. If btc fails, all the most cryptocurrency exited people will have lost moeny time etc... and I think there is a good chance FIAT is the only winner.

Yes it will be very interesting to see how the future will look like.

bitcoin can't fails, anymore too big already, the time for it to fail passed long time ago even before 2013 peak, and it can not fail exactly because, there will be only fiat after it which is the whole point of bitcoin, not having to deal with fiat

crypto is here to stay and to be enhanced in the future i can bet two asses on that

I agree. I'm just saying that if people think litecoin or something else can take over if btc fails, that is almost 0 percent likely. Because crypto currencies stand or fall with btc.

Having said that I also dont see btc failing at all.

I think it's perfectly feasible. If new technologies that are better come, Bitcoin will assimilate them. Also, take into account that best doesn't mean winner. We've had ipv6 for years now, and ipv4 still resists and it seems we aren't changing anytime soon. It's all about good enough + network effect and Bitcoin is good enough and is king of network effect with the most powerful network on this planet. We'll easily see 100K in 10 to 20 years.

I'm wondering now when the time comes that we are last to the last few thousand coins do you guys think that adding POS proof of stake will actually work for bitcoin, it would at lease save a lot of power energy when it comes to that.

Possible, however then the whole ideal of "bitcoin, I will be rich because it deflates, no inflations, better than gold" will be lost and there would be more than 21million coins, right? It could change and evolve, as it should for the benefit of all. There would need to be a global agreement.

This makes no sense. The importance of blockchain technology is proven. If bitcoin fails for any reason, the cause of that failure will be addressed and corrected in another blockchain based cryptocurrency

Of course eventually I think it is likely that fiat will be issued in the form of crypto currency at some point by major governments.

There will always be demand for a decentralized system outside of the control of any one party

Yes, blockchain is still viable under more controlled circumstances. However, private people and coorporations losing hundreds of dollars is not something that doesn't happen many times. Imagine you put 25% of your wealth into bitcoin and had it stolen by hack or being Goxed - would you then put another big piece of your wealth into bitcoin? So cryptocurrencies (as we know now with bitcoin etc) is likely to suffer collectively tremendously. The underlying blockchain idea can still work like citigroup forsees it or in other areas outside of the financial system even.. but that is a different discussion.

It probably won't work and will never happen. Firstly, switching from POW to POS would require a hard fork which is a hassle for everyone to do. Secondly, POS requires much less power to attack than POW and those who have ASIC would probably be useless. Thirdly, POW allows everyone with an ASIC/Computer to mine whereas in POS, you require coins. Monopoly can happen with huge exchanges or gambling site and majority of the latecomers won't be able to mine.