Bitcoin Forum

Although it is a long time away, who will confirm transactions when mining ceases?

mining wont cease.. there are 125 years worth of reasons for atleast 3people ->infinite people, to keep mining..

no one knows how many people will mine. no one knows how much the equipment will cost to mine.. but as long as 2 moral people or preferably 3 people mine bitcoin.. it will continue..

so relax, there are going to be enough financial incentive to keep mining going even for your great great great great grandkids to use bitcoin.

i would be more concerned about YOUR fiat retirement funds in the fiat market..
after all $2 bought 4 loaves of bread 30 years ago.. and now it only buys 1 loaf.. and in 30 years time it will be only a quarter of a loaf (in your lifetime), so worry more about fiat. as that quarter of a loaf for $2 is BEST case scenario for fiat.. as you may not even get a single slice of bread for $2..

apparently you missed that if mining ceases to exist, bitcoin will die, unless in the future to avoid this, there will be a fork for a pow-pos hybrid

i believe that the answer for this is much early than many think, there is no need to wait until 2140, when it's clear that in 2028 already the block halving will put a big dent on the reward

Mining will never die out, because miner's incentive will be transaction fee's of blocks mined, which now are just a portion of miner's reward,
but later on, it's going to represent all the profit miners will have.
Everyone (myself included) believe that number of transactions and bitcoin price will both be more than enough of a reason to mine, and thus keep securing the network.

For this we need first scale successfully, in order to increase the number of transactions. But yes, I agree with you. Once transactions take over, I believe that miners will make even more money than with block rewards. In this way, incentives to mine will be probably even bigger than today.

You've confused mining and the mining reward. The mining reward itself will stop around 2140. As others said, by that point, the transaction fees hopefully will be able to cover the mining reward and reward the miners. Mining itself does not stop when the reward stops, it will continue provided that the miners still receive a reward.

As the bulk of bitcoins are produced miners will increasingly earn BTC from routing transactions and depend less and less on block rewards. That is the system described by Satoshi in the white paper. Simple and elegant.

I always wished the min payout was 1mBTC... but w/e.

I guess this is the most sensible post out here. Mining will never cease as it is always possible to do so. Even with only transactions, someone will mine if there is hardly competition as they will get the reward than.

Most likely, if bitcoin makes it to the point in 2140, it will be so big that mining rewards will never be an issue anyway.