Bitcoin Forum

His majesty the King Cuong Truong wants to know:

"Can miners still mine Bitcoin after the 21 million Bitcoins have been mined?"

Yes. Mining supports the network. Eventually the reward for mining will be just the transaction fees.

How much can miners make from just transaction fees?

That would depend on the number of transactions in a block that a miner solves.  The current transaction fee is 0.005 BTC I believe.

Base on all of your answers, the miners using graphic cards won't be able to make any money.

Also, when butterflylabs mass produced their asic mining machines, most of those machines will not be able to make any money.

That's what it seems like to me.

By then transaction fees will most likely be higher. If there are too many transactions not all of them will get mine into the blockchain immediately. People will add more fees to their transactions to entice miners to include theirs quicker.

That is how it is supposed to work when there is no more block reward. It will supposedly be marginally profitable as a whole.

Ahhh, so that's how the transaction fees work then? Been wondering about asking about that and sure enough I won't be able to explain that to people who don't already use computers regularly >_<

The bitcoin wallet software allows people to add more transaction fees to their transaction to entice miners?

Just about 8 months ago transaction fees were only about 0.1% of the miners profit per block found due to the smaller # of transaction in the network, as well as smaller fees and larger block reward of 50BTC.

In October 2012 Transaction fee were about 0.5% of the reward given to miners per block (50BTC + 0.25BTC Fees);

Now Transaction fees about about 1-1.5% (0.4BTC) of the reward of the found block due to the smaller block (25BTC) and larger # of transactions

Every 4 years the block reward would be reduced for the next 40 years, so Transaction Fees will reach parity with block reward sometimes in the future.

Now consider that the price per BTC is $1000, so transaction fees alone would earn more $ per block compared to when reward was 50BTC per block but 1BTC was worth only $10.

You won't be able to earn a living on transaction fees if your mining pool steals keeps them. Always ask your pool what happens to transaction fees. Eligius ???

There will likely always been another crypto-coin to mine when Bitcoin gets unprofitable, if your ASIC works with it, that's another story.

Sadly, most people don't look at all the variables when choosing a pool. Ozcoin FTW!

With the maximum of 7 Transactions per second and a transaction fee of 0.005 Bitcoin the maximium current return for mining a block without any minted Bitcoin reward is 21 Bitcoin

Two possible future scenarios will change this:

• 1. The Max Block size is changed requiring a fork
• 2. The standard fee of 0.005 Bitcoin is increased

Today something like a 4 years old notebook struggles with current block size/7 Transactions per second,
but after the 21 million Bitcoins have been mined average computers will be *so*much* better.

Max Block size will be increased. It would be silly not to.

The block reward halves ever ~1450 days.  So even the block reward wont drop to below 1 btc until 2032 and in the beginning of 2080 the block reward will be 0.00038147 and since bitcoins are infinite divisibility, there should always be a block reward.
That is not much but that could be worth a few dollars.  It might not be worth running the crazy dedicated rigs that some have now but it might be worth running a normal computer and hoping to get a few extra dollars each year.  This all really depends on the exchange rate at any given time.  If the price dropped to $10 / btc tomorrow and stayed there for a while, you's likely see people shutting down their rigs (those that pay for electric, at least).

The truth of the matter is that the system is more secure the more people are mining.  Right now there are properly far too few people in control of mining and deciding how things work.  Think about what would happen if 3 or 4 mining pools got together and demanded a minimum transaction fee to put a transaction in a block.  Some miners would leave the pools, but if the operators shared the fees with miners, not many would leave.