Bitcoin Forum

So I was watching videos on youtube and I came accross to a video regarding the facts about bitcoin. I saw there that every halving the reward block is halve right? And so the rewards that the miner will get will decreased. My question is what will happen to the miners if there will be no more coins to mine? Since there is only a limit on how many bitcoins can be produced, a time will come that mining will put on stop. What will happen to the bitcoin price if then?

The miners still get the fees, so hopefully by then, the fees should be worth enough to make mining profitable
If the fees aren't enough for mining to be profitable, some miners will stop mining, raising the amount of blocks found by the leftover miners... that way the leftover miners find more blocks => more fees => profit :)

Miners will still be able to turn a profit from transaction fees.

Yep.

If you want to understand the idea, then the white paper is a good place to start and end. You can find it linked in my sig where it says "the gospel according to Satoshi".

Assuming the prices are going up to right now unseen price levels. Then yes, they will be able to mine at a profit when also the fees get higher due to the fact that there is nothing left to mine.

But the fees will need to be high enough for the miners to bother, that is why I doubt we can have super low fees for life. Imagine we are in 2140... do you think we will still be paying the current fees? I don't think so. Well when I say "we" I obviously mean "they", unfortunately.

currently we see 0.3-0.5btc tx fees for each block and it will increase with time when more users start using bitcoin and do transaction.the time when bitcoin block rewards go very down price will also increase to make it worth mining.at that time this small tx fees will enough for miners to make profit from mining.

This is the best explanation IMO. Simple but still very accurate. I'll try to make it even more simple:

The lesser the number of the miners the more the rewards the left miners get.

So, no worries, Bitcoin will be here until the end of times. )

Also, fun fact, if I'm not wrong, there will only be 21 million coins released and we have currently mined 15 million..

the master mind satoshi have made a almost perfect thing it is not going any where miners still gonna get profit probably more and i think when there is no more coins to mine that time bitcoin price will also rise and will be stable then now because no new coins are being mined only old coins are in the market

Of course there will be money to make in fees but that's not the only reason to keep the network security in place. If Bitcoin survives in its present form for another 125 years then millions of businesses will depend on it. Those businesses (let's say, like BitPay) will keep farms going to support the system that their business depends on. Fees collected will be a secondary concern for them.

At that point, miners will still continue their functions and be reward with the transaction fees.

In 2140 the issue of coins will end but mining will still be needed. PoW is an essential part of the network, so mining will still need to be done.

Thanks for this. Will be reading this tomorrow when I got some time.
Thanks for all the answer guys. I did understand that but what if then after all coins has been mined, miners will be paid only by transactions right? So what if then the time comes that the btc price fell down? Is that possible?

By functions you mean what? They will continue mining? there will be no more coins lef tomine right so wha woul they do now?

That has a low chance of happening as price increases as demand increases(most of the times)
As to your question, you'll be dead by then . From what I heard from DannyHamilton and other members, the year the last BTC(partial) will be mined is 2140*. So yeah, lot of time for that to happen. Anyway coming back to what will happen, miners will just get the tx fees, and hopefully by then either BTC price is very high that mining is still sustainable or transaction fees increase. The former is more likely I believe.

*Googled and it seems , its just an estimate but you get the idea.

** Forgot another possiblity that is, (majority of) nodes decide that number of bitcoins should be increased, so the protocol may be changed

Mining is also the process for creating the blocks that mathematically secure the network. The fee they get for doing this creates competition leading to the lowest transaction fee that can be supported profitably. Over time miners will make an increasing percentage of profit from fees rather than block rewards. So basically they are being paid to burn electricity and keep the system running.

Talk about mentality, you make it sound way horrible

this assuming that the value of bitcoin is very high, to have the same profit as they have now a farm of 1 peta for example, need to earn 4.43 btc a day($2k)

this mean that the value of bitcoin must be in the range of 1000x higher, assuming that they can earn 400k in fee each day in the future

so basically the same marketcap as gold...

ha, lol. I sure appreciate their work.

It will be the same as now, it could rise and could fall. The only difference is with the miners. They will only mine bitcoin transactions and no actual bitcoins, so i dont know what will happen with the fees. The needs for HASH power will definetly be smaller though.

The miners will use the fees to pay for the cost and profit. The need for hash will not drop if the bitcoin value is high.

Hopefully the bitcoin market will then stabilize at a very comfortable level and it will be all about the fees for the miners.

this must be true, because if we are still sitting at 1k-10k range of value, then bitcoin is doomed for sure, miners will not be able to receive enough reward to keep the network alive

unless a small sum is forwarded to incentivate the running of full node...

It should stabilize yes, but not at a fixed price level.

I think stable and predictable growth would be a better phrasing of what we need. 20% growth or decline in a week is insane, but over a year for example would be perfect for the future.

Yea, I also thought of the same thing a while back and it sounds insane. We are bargaining on a lot of things to happen to sustain the network. We hope transaction volumes will

go through the roof and the miners fees will increase to reach a level where it can replace bitcoins as a miner reward. We hope people and businesses will burn electricity to

sustain the network. The probability is high, but it stays an experiment. We determine the outcome of this experiment...

The problem that i think bitcoin would have in the future is if we dont have enough of a user base then by the time all bitcoins are mined there wouldnt be enough fees to cover miners. Saying that i think the final mined bitcoins are quite some time away and if we dont have a better user base by then , then we never will.

It is safe to assume that by 2140, new methods of mining Bitcoin will be around, maybe Quantum Computers are already available and we can mine Bitcoins in a viable way, so I wouldn't be worried of it becoming unsustainable.

by 2140 bitcoin would have to be a mental prices to cover the cost of mining , Im assuming by then everything would be more expensive. Wont really matter too much to any of us by then anyway though,you never know , maybe your bitcoin you earned today will be worth a fortune to your kids or grand kids in a few years time.

Miners receive transaction fees as rewards from transactions occurring in each block. New coin production will take long time to finish. There will be 3 or more generations came into existence from now. We don't know or can't say, what will be the future of bitcoin? how well will it be recognized by people all over the world. Predicting a guess now is a good idea and is a very good brainstorming thing.

I see this as self regulating. If the fee is too low to be profitable then it will simply go up. You can include a tiny fee, but it may not get picked up and so the user pays a price that attracts interest. In the future it is likely that fees will rise. However any competitors (like PayPal) charges huge fees for the same service and can not possibly compete with the bitcoin system.  Think of each Tx as a contract offer and the winner is the lowest bid.

yeah the network can regulate itself but the demand must be there, otherwise if you simply increase the fee to, dunno 100k satoshi, or even 0.01-0.1 range, but the value is just 10k

it mean that the reward will be very low for the miner, i don't have data right now about how many fee are generated nowadays, and how much will be generated in the future, with a better adoption

Those are thoughts worth considering Amph. Very low levels of use could lead to truly high fees. I suppose that would be scaling also, but not the kind we want.  :-\

It is interesting to see how people think about this "problem" now and how they thought about it 4&5 years ago before ASIC dominance..

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67900.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67900.0)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6284.0 (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6284.0)

nothing... my other post was wrong, from the look of the blockchain stats it seems that there are 32 btc in fee each day which is somehow 1/100 of the total bitcoin mined today

this simply means that the value in future must increase 100x, or the fee increased to 100x(0.01+) or the number of total transactions per day raised to 100x which means 20M per day

but the last point is hindered by the block limit, and even 8MB will not suffice

From what I understand the miners will get fees. Maybe then it might be viable for us to get into mining. I imagine most the big miners will shut up shop so we will have to keep things going ourselves.

I like bitcoin for the ease of transacting. If we need sufficiently higher fees for the miners, that's going to take away transaction volume which is important for an economy.. how is that supposed to work? BItcoin seems to be heading towards "large transactions only"?

Less hash power will solve it. It's not a huge problem to think about. What more important is the size of the user base for the future of BTC.

Less hash power will make the system more vulnerable to attack, especially when there are many retired old generation mining rigs which can be bought cheaply to assemble an attack

I think it will be best that the hash rate continuously climb without stop, similar to bitcoin's supply continuously shrink without stop, thus the security of the network is forever increasing. However, that will depend on two variables: Exchange rate and Miner's fee income

Suppose that exchange rate doubles every 4 years, then the income of miners will remain the same after reward halving. Notice that reward halving is a cut-off event while exchange rate won't jump 100% over night, so basically when the reward halving happens, hash rate is always following the exchange rate, and some kind of shock would still be observed: Halving will reduce the hash rate for a while similar to a difficulty jump of 100%, until new generation chips are manufactured

However, if exchange rate do not change a lot during a 4+ years' period, then the miner's income will really become less, but due to the same reason as above, the hash rate will always self-adjust to the most stable status where majority of the miners can make a small profit

But diminishing mining COIN income is a bad thing. The success of bitcoin is mostly based on the fact that people can through mining get lots of bitcoins. If you can not get enough coins through mining, then it is like a centrally planned economy where early adopters already sitting tight on majority of the coins and preventing future people to get enough coins, kind of market manipulation similar to central banks holding large amount of gold reserve but never use them

So it is better to slowly raise the fee and keep the future mining income per block above 10 bitcoin at least, so that miner act as a money redistributor, constantly receive money from existing users against the transaction service to avoid wealth concentration

If the difficulty keeps on rising, even the 100x price rise is not enough. Does it indicate the price will rise more than 100x?

I think when the mining will stop but what all said the transaction fees will be moving it and the buying and selling of bitcoins will be their in the market so the transaction fees will me more so their should not be any problem.

Then i think who ever is keeping high stock of bitcoins will raise the price and sell the bitcoins so the price raise will also be their. with every high price the transaction fees will also be get riched

yeah that's correct, the diff will most likely keep with the value increase, so this mean that we can not rely only on the price increase but with need transaction fee increase and total tx increase, which is somehow correlated with adoption increase

It should be right to believe that only limited quantity of btc is there.
And one time miner won't able to mine..
But think bitcoin transaction will,never end.. so being blocks will never end and the transaction fees in blocks can be mined..
It is true that difficulty will increase but I don't think there will be a rigid stop to mining..
Possibly there should be low profitable

By that time, BTC will be so widely adopted that tx fees will easily supplement block rewards.

We know that the difficulty of mining increases exponentially. Last btc will be very hard to mine. It takes so many time and resources (electricity, time, etc.) So if 1 btc price is not more than 6 digits no one will want to mine it. 

If there is no more coins to mine, i think the bitcoin price will increase so high. and maybe many faucets will reduce the payment. and also the rate of signature campaign also decrease. But it's okay, because the bitcoin price is high.

By the way, there are many altcoins which are pre-mined. Nobody needs to mine it they are already in the market.

I believe when that time comes there is nothing more to mine, transactions will be tripled in quantity or maybe more to which transaction fees may not have to be raise. imagine thousands if not millions of transactions each day to which fees goes to the miners. those will be enough more like solving blocksizes.

I m more worried regarding the fact what happens if BTC halves and the price does not go up 2x. This means lots of farms will be become instantly unprofitable, stop mining, the diff will crumble and what then?

Welllllllll.... If nobody is mining blocks, no transactions will be included, no confirmations, nothing... So even for pre-mined altcoins, mining is necessary.

Pre-mining is usually just a trick to cash out and scam the community (there might be exeptions to this rule)

Till then bitcoin will be much more adapted and integrated in internet transactions..
Mining is just one phase in life of bitcoin..
Usage is the next phase i think every day we finding new wey of usage for bitcoin in real life.

Many farm will run out of business.

I am more worried about the altcoin mining. 7970 is excellent for Ethereum mining, but the mining will finish in a year's time. These cards are not great for modern game now.

Yes, you are right. The transactions fees will be there for miners, they will receive it always. The transaction fee is always the source for them and as the bitcoin gets higher value like one satoshi's value some $5 or $10. Then there is no need of block reward just a the fees are more than enough with millions of transactions.

This will only happen in 100 years. Miners will still earn from the transaction fees. But there is no use worrying about this now.

The miners would get the transaction fees from people's transactions. Hopefully they rise so mining can still be profitable.

When the difficulty crumble and it become profitable for some miners to mine again, the network is still maintained.

I might be dead by the time it happens, but I suspect at some point mining will no longer be directly profitable.

It will be done by hobbyists and business just to keep the network secure, just like many of us rub a full-node client 24/7 to help keep the network secure.

I think if there is nomore coins to mine, the bitcoin price will increase so high because you can mine it again. and maybe so many people start using bitcoin because the price so high.

There are many altcoins which are pre-mined. So no worries...  ;D

It is going to take another 100 years before all the coins are mined, the fees will be huge by that time. I hope.

if it really happen,i think bitcoin will lost so many users,and there just bitcoin transaction in this world,no more bitcoin miners or bitcoin classic. i think need 10 or more years until bitcoin reach limit.

Thats ticky, I never mined coins so not sure, but yes probably the end of BTC ?

The miners will still mine for the transaction fees. They are supporting the network, so they will get paid. This will last forever.

Agree with you, satoshi had thought all of that to avoid the defects of the system that might come up in the future.

I'm impatient to see what will happen after the halving.
12.5 BTC per block is not much...if the price will not double...
many many miners will give up...certainly

Not 100 years but it will probably take 2-3 years more till all the 20,999,999.9769 coins are mined. Currently we have 15,133,075 coins mined and I don't know why the amount is finite and cannot exceed 20,999,999.9769 coins in total. As per the blockchain graph, the number increases by 2,000,000 every 12 months.

Yes, generally to maintain the miners earnings prior to halving, the price must double to compensate the total value in Fiat but who knows. Once the price doubles there will be a massive sell off from those who are taking their profits and there are lots of them, so it's possible that the price will have a major dip unless the whales will inject some money to the exchanges to buy those sell orders.

With the continuous halving, the value would probably increase bit by bit till there is little to no supply. It would likely stabilize to a much higher amount. Bitcoin block size would also be huge when coin distribution ends, thus allowing for miners to gain more coins from a block. As miners shut down their miners, the difficulty would decrease to compensate and thus giving miners their profit back. If the blocks become much slower due to large number of miners turning off their ASICs at the middle of period, fees would increase and miners would switch it back on. By the time Bitcoin gets there, the ASICs and electrical fees would be so cheap that it is still profitable for larger mining farms.

2-3 years?!?!?!?!

just for reference take a look here http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/10486/when-will-the-last-bitcoin-be-mined

it can not exceed because the nb mined is divided per 2 all 4 years...it comes a moment where only 6 bitcoin are mined every 10 minutes then 3 then 1.5 (or so) etc...

it depend on the value of bitcoin and on the number of transaction per second, currently miners are earning 32-50 btc max from fee

and they need to match the same revebue from their reward which is 3600 coins per day = $1440000

It will be the end of the mining only as if no more coins are mined, the users who own the coins would just keep exchange them with other users but no more coins would be generated and this would affect the bitcoin price as well. It would stop the supply of bitcoins and probably be the end of bitcoins.

I agree here as till bitcoins hold a value and miners profit from their job, this would continue as it is going on now. If bitcoin loses its value and reaches a price that does not help even the miners, they would probably stop mining then and we could say officially that bitcoin is dead. It happened earlier as well when there were very few miners to mine these coins.

I suppose it would all depend on the transaction volumes should that day come. I remember an article regarding that in the past, that the block size should remain at 1mb so there would be higher fees to compensate the miners.

It's the same case if dollars are no more generated by the reserve bank and hence the coins that exist on that day would remain the same. I guess it would make the bitcoin price stable and not change anything. The miners wouldn't receive any coins for the transactions though.

Coin supply is as important as coin demand. Even if all coins would be mined, the price could still be depending on adoption level. Moreover, after the possible world-wide hype, some people could conclude that they don't need bitcoins anymore, and they prefer fiat.

yeah its really a nice topic if there is no more coins to mine what will happens to the miners but I am sure there will be some ways out of it. and the bitcoins masters will sure make something happen to grow it later.

Accepted soon such situation would arise. But before that an alternate solution will be generated so to cut down the defects. Its true for a great price increase if there is nomore coins to mine.

Link? Even though 1mb block with high transaction volume would benefit the miners by reducing the orphans and having higher fees/kb, it is not realistic at all. With a higher TX volume and low block size, there is a risk for transactions to not get included for a long time, increasing the cost and thus resulting in slower adoption rates and merchants reluctance of accepting 0 conf transactions.

Depending on the transaction volume and supply, the coins may be worthless or worth a lot. There's no guarantees about this.

You should just wait and see. Maybe keep the coins though.
And if the coins leave then they surely again there something else came up.
So there's no reason to stop.

I think it's clear that it's going to be a price increase, but I don't know what it's going to be,

If there is no more coins to mine, i'm sure the bitcoin price will increase very very high. and it will affect the bitcoin itself. i mean like, it will hard to earn free bitcoin. maybe like that.

All we talk about now is capacity of processing transactions. If transactions continue to increase, there will be plenty of demand from miners to process all the transactions and keep the currency alive. That's the geniality of it. And, of course, by then every miner will have ROI'd already, so it wouldn't be any disaster for the investors.

What if there is nomore gold to mine?

The answer is "almost" same for coins with the difference that we will "mine" transaction fees...

We'll see won't we?  Perhaps the transaction fees will be both enough to secure the coin and not enough to force users into other coins.  I don't see this as a sure thing though.   

This is why woodcoin uses a logarithmic supply curve rather than geometric - there will always be some more coins left to distribute in coinbase.  Well, for the next 300 million years at least. 

Bitcoin projects for the future are unknown ,the thing is the foundation works at the present and have some things they changing slowly.

Recently blockchain implement its wallet update and seem like they take out sign message which I believe can affect the blocksize. Other wallets may also implement such and hope this will also end the blocksize issue and price may go up. :) miners may still be miners.

You guys are missing the point. The deeper question here is 'how thick do the walls of a safe need to be to protect its contents when the value of its contents is always changing and ultimately unknowable?'
What you miss is when miners abandon the community the hardware they used regardless if its resold or trashed will be antiquated within a year, so the community has to be continuously reinvesting profits in new state of the art mining hardware, cutting edge hardware or the network becomes antiquated and the price to attack the network falls below the incentives to protect it.  This inflection point is currently unknowable because we don't know how much value has been stored using the bitcoin blockchain outside of its traditional use as a currency.

Under your retarded explanation of the situation the whole bitcoin network would run off 1 cent in total transaction fees per block because the last man standing would still be able to turn a profit but that dose nothing for our security.

right now tx fee are 1/8 of the total reward from mining, and they will be 1/4 with the halving, so tx fee don't need to be worth a lot more, if the value skyrocket to 8x what it is now, miners could already earn good from the fee alone

Yes, when block reward goes down, value of one satoshi and number of transactions will be keeping on raising. When block reward = 0 BTC, at that time also miners will be earning equivalent worth of bitcoins due to high bitcoin value ( like one satoshi = $10 ) and immense number of transactions.

i made a mistake it's 1/80 and not 1/8, so value need to skyrocket to 80x, a different story indeed...

because it mean that we need a $32K in value in the future, around 2028 already, fee must account for a greater portion of the profit, because the reward would be only 1 btc

By this time it will be the end of Bitcoin No. 1337

Miners will then make their money from transaction fees which by that stage should be fairly sizeable considering it will be over 100 years away.....

I like to think of it as oil drilling (ignoring the fact oil is being created every day)

Basically, there will be the easy stuff to pull out first, and then it slowly gets to harder and harder things to drill for. Until the point where the price of oil needs to keep going up to support those businesses.

$32k bitcoin in 2028 is achieveable. It is 80 times of present value. The price just needs to rise 44% a year from now on.

with no more coins to mine you achieve the NXT status
0 impact on price

with the rising number of transactions and people adopting bitcoin, i strongly believe that will be the case, and all this machines already invested upon will then serve the transactions and make it a very resilient network.

With NXT, if there is no wide adoption, the price of each NXT will reduce proportionally to the newly created coins.

This question's answer is basically the same as the answer to "What is there is no more gold to mine?". Well the currency supply stabilises and if the user base continues to grow, that would mean there is deflation instead of inflation!

if that happen,no more bitcoin to mined,i think there only bitcoin transaction,bitcoin move to wallet to other wallet,just it. and of course trading activity will not hold so long.

Gold miners would probably start to look for another work, don't know how this relate to bitcoin mining? Will mining only for fees cover the cost of big mining farms?

If there is no more coins OR gold to mine then I guess they'll just change and become traders like the rest.

When the last coin will be mined, it will be a great moment for all of us! For miners less.. ;)
Miners will earn only from transactions fees. Price, with an increasingly popularity will be growing all the time - in the name of the law of supply and demand.

But beyond the speculation factors, what would be the reason to buying BTC if price will go higher and higher? Every price bubble has its limits.

Do you realized that without miners there will be not confirmed transaction? Which means Bitcoin needs Miners and mining is a part of Bitcoin. Rewards for miners will be paid by transaction fee completely.

Some coin still profitable to mine and ETH is a good example for that
check it out

If there are no more coins to mine, bitcoin would still survive only if prices are high and there are still miners that process transactions. Miners can still profit from fees, though. That is the only incentive they will get once there are no more coins to mine.

I'm not sure from which part of my post you understand that after last mined coin we don't need miners?
It seems that you wrote the same thing as I, only in other words .. or you didn't read what I wrote!?

We should not forget that in future we may have better cost effective hardwares for mining and cheap electricity.If that happens,mining will still be profitable low fee even if bitcoin price is around 500$-1000 $

Not really.  Transaction security using gold has nothing to do with miners.  Transaction security using bitcoin has everything to do with miners. 

Hardwares changes nothing except who has access to them and thus who is getting the miner rewards.  Difficulty adjustments factor out hardware differences. 

what security have to do with the deflation aspect of bitcoin, when the supply do not put more pressure on the market?

miners will have their regular profit via fee, that what they need to sustain the nertwork, and deflation will help this greatly, because the value will skyrocket with a greater demand and less dumping from mining