Bitcoin Forum

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

That's the concept... Eventually, the block reward will be almost nothing... Dust...
By then, the transaction fees should be enough to cover the mining expenses. If the fees aren't enough, most miners will stop mining, the diff will drop and the leftover miners will find more blocks, thus claiming more fees.

What (hopefully) also will happen, is by then a lot of coins will be lost + a lot of extra users will use bitcoin, so the price will rise exponentially, which is great for early adopters  ;D

As long as the people uses bitcoin it will never really change anything even if the coins were already all mined. The price could change. Yes. But how it circulates will never change. The only difference is that there will be no more fresh bitcoins.

the miners will got their block solving reward from the fees, i think, when the block size increased, the gathered fees will have pretty high value, and it'll be distributed to those miners,and the price will rise,so no problem at all to those miners, but just for example ,when in a day 10BTC lost because of some people lost control of his wallet/address,and this thing didn't stop to happen day by day,maybe someday bitcoin will get lost

I think it will just be distributed to any online transaction. New schemes and styles on how to mine btc. New alt coins. Everything will just be new. And it will recognized someday by people. And maybe it will not just be online transaction.

I am trying to collect as much BTC as I can for that moment when it will come, hopefully it will come true, otherwise I would have lost quite a lot of time of my life collecting this amount of BTC for nothing if the price doesn't rise exponentially.

I know what you mean, i rarely spend any coin, but i try to do as much tasks in my free time to hoard BTC because i believe it will tenfold in price in the next years to come...

You can't run out of bitcoin. If it ever happens, then bitcoin will be dead. Nothing hard to be predicted.

At that time some altcoins will be popular too, so people can switch to altcoins. Currently, for example, Doge is still popular crypto with fast transaction time.  ;)

and how BTC can become mainstream(a currency) in this way? :)  it's a non sense and it shows that BTC system is weak.

Well, I never thought that bitcoin will be exhausted, because bitcoin will always grow, but if it occurs, may bitcoin will be items difficult step in the search and make the price further increase

What would be the problem with my explanation? It does not contradict bitcoin becoming mainstream imho. Neither does it show bitcoin to be weak.

In total 21.000.000 coins will be mined. Some of them are lost (sent to addresses without known private keys), some of them are satoshi's, some of them are in the hands of a couple of people who will not touch them... The rest can be sent and received... The transactions between people will be included in blocks because each tx will pay a fee to the miner who includes the tx in a block. This will happen regardless of the fact if the block reward is high or very, very, very low.

The miner will keep the fees, the people can pay with bitcoin, buy bitcoin, sell bitcoin,... The more people there are, and the more coins get lost, the higher the price will be.
If eventually the price becomes really high, one can add a couple more zero's (at the moment, the smallest ammount of bitcoin one can count is 0.00000001, but this is not set in stone... The dev's can make 0.0000000001 the smallest ammount if they wish... So even if 20.000.000 of the 21.000.000 gets lost, we can still use the leftover bitcoins to pay for our needs)  ;D

Bitcoin will not be ran out as long as blockchain is there!

As quoted some alts will try to take the place of bitcoin. But looking back the days from its existence it has never felt such a mining issue even when it was sold at very low price. So this won't happen anymore.

Then we can just circulate it but it needed to be used not just stocked. By the time it is depleted it will need some movement everytime so that people will also knew that there is this kind of currency that can be used online.

if bitcoin stopped then the price of bitcoin will automatically climb. bitcoin will be increasingly difficult to obtain due to the high demand for bitcoin. the higher the demand, the higher the price of bitcoin on the market.

the supply is almost 21M not 20M, and anyway the point is not in the numbers of coins, but in their value

quality over quantity this is the philosophy, in comparison to the fiat inflation thing, where they print endless

Yes do you think there's a limit for it. Haven't heard about that before also because they don't
give much publicity to the coin, but i don't think there is a limit mining can still be remaining.

Can we really run out of Bitcoins? I think that if we run out of Bitcoins they have to create more but that will devalue the Bitcoin. So that would not be a good thing.

As long as there is one bitcoin left, the network can function since it can be subdivided without limit. However there is a question about whether transaction fees can ever by themselves be high enough to guarantee there is enough mining to secure Bitcoin against attacks.  Some have even said that in the future a government might have to take over mining if it views Bitcoin as a public good, e.g. a public utility.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/876/how-much-will-transaction-fees-eventually-be

After the 21 million have been mined there will not be any 'new' bitcoins created but we will never run out of bitcoin as we will have people buying and selling it and purchasing goods with it.  The miners will no longer have the large block reward but miners will collect the fees that are associated to the generated block.

I don' t think we'll run out of btc as long as there's a portion of it going into circulation, be it in transactions, trades, in gambling. Miners might run out of work but it doesn't mean that they won't find something else worthy to make of btc.

If that happens then we are all wasted. Let's go back to reality and deposit our fiat money into banks that put interest to our money and let it lend it to people. But ofcourse, this isn't going to happen. As long as there is halving and we are using it. There is sufficient bitcoin supply for us.

How do you mean run out of bitcoins is there any limit of bitcoins? I never heard about it before from where
do you get that information? If there would be a limit 20 mil is not much we already reached that

There will be almost 2,099,999,997,690,000 spendable units created.

We already have nearly 75% of that.

The remaining 25% will take more than 100 years to finish mining.


Bitcoin won't exist anymore if the mining process stops.  Fortunately it is designed to continue for as long as there are users that want to use it and enough miners to secure it.

Perhaps you are asking what we will do when the block subsidy goes away and there are no new bitcoins being created?

In that case, we will be dead.  We won't "do" anything.

Perhaps you are asking what our great-grandchildren will do when the block subsidy goes away and there are no new bitcoins being created?

I'm not sure why you're worried about that. Future generations may have entirely new technologies.  That's a bit like someone in 1900 trying to figure out how you are going to handle technology today.

But at a minimum, the mining process will continue and the miners will be rewarded with transaction fees instead of the block subsidy.

Even if mining reward get to 0 or any dust amount miner will keep on mining because they will get good amount of transaction fee as mine reward. There will be no much effect if few miners left from the whole poll of miners after there we have 0 bitcoins as block reward.

75% of all the coins have already been mined so it is fair to say we are already in a situation where the vast majority of Bitcoins that will ever be have been minted.

Mining of the remaining 25% will continue for another century so it is not really worth discussing what will happen in 2116 - we'll all be long dead by then. Most likely, Bitcoin will either have faded into irrelevance or it will have taken off at which point the fees from transactions will be more than enough to compensate miners.

We will never "run out of Bitcoin" since old coins can be recirculated and are infinitely divisible. Even if 90% of all the coins in circulation were lost to misplaced wallets, the other 10% would be more than enough.