Bitcoin Forum

So, I've been doing a bunch of research and trying to find the answer to this question.  Keyword searches have failed to find anyone discussing this topic, but I would imagine it has been discussed in the past.  Looking to be pointed the right direction here.

After all 21M bitcoins have released to the public (miners), what incentive will miners have to continue the mining process?  

Likely the bitcoin protocol will be changed by then or one BTC has enough price that miners can make do with just tx fees

Miners will receive only the transaction fees included in the blocks he mined. If they think it is not worth it, it will end up reducing the difficulty of mining and opening up the possibility of other people mining, it will self-regulate.

Miners completely depend upon the transaction fee for their earning. As a part we can some other digital currencies growing potentially without limits of coin generation. Importantly after 21m the price will be very high, even a single satoshi will be in much demand.

Then it will just be circulation. If all happened the way we want it like thousands of dollars per bitcoin then we will be trading by satoshis. If not then the top holders will be waiting for that until bitcoin becomes so rare that finding one to buy is so difficult.
Remember those 21 million are not all alive. Some are buried and cannot be found anymore.

Considering transaction volume nowadays become increased and the fees also increased to reach confirmed transaction as default (ok, it's also can use zero fee, but need some conditions or waiting for a long long time). Here's the miners will earn they reward, plus the price will increased as demand > supply.

All the coins will be out in the open and then to keep the network moving the miners will be working for transaction fees, it will be a great time to be around to see how it all works out, sadly unless we have a time machine we won't be able to see this outcome.

Let me tell you what is supposed to happen, and then you decide for yourself if it will work or not. We currently have 2 rewards, namely Block

rewards and miners fee and the miners gets both. So in future when the Block rewards falls away, the miners fees are supposed to fill that gap.

By then, there should be more users and much more transactions and these tx's should make up for the Block rewards that stopped. Now, we

see things like the Lighting Network, that would dramatically reduce tx's on the Blockchain, and this in my opinion is not a good idea. Yes, miners

might run nodes that might generate lots of income, but that is not guaranteed to fill the gap.  ::)

The answer to that is very simple it means that the price of bitcoin will sky rocket and the miners will have to make more money by charging higher transaction fees and for those who are having enough bitcoin kept will make enormous wealth. Aside from that, other alt coin will now be a favorite as it will now be the one that is affordable by people who want to trade crypto-currency which in this case bitcoin will no longer be affordable.

Then we are done and can go home.  :D

By that time the transaction fees will be significantly larger and mining will only take place for the transaction fees.

In 2013, typical fees were 0.01 BTC per block. Now, in Feb 2017, they are around 1.0 BTC per block, as much as 100x as much as they were in 2013.

If you look at the recent price changes for transaction you can very well understand that miners will feed off every transactions made by the users when all the coins are mined. It will hurt bitcoin without any doubt as no one will be transacting using a higher fees when there are other alts with lower transaction fees.

I think there will be a big celebration of some sort?

Might as well gets trashed by mods.

Interesting, I never think that day, we will be all dead, it may be the most widespread currency in the world. It may be dead too. Who knows? God knows only.

Bitcoin will never touch 21 million but after all of the mining phase of bitcoin will have gone and the miners just get their reward from the transaction fees. and if there are the blocksize improvement in the future and they're no need to increasing the transaction fees. the large block can take more transaction and more fees will come to the miners without increasing the transaction fees.

miner still have return,
miner can return from fee sending tx id, every sending fee receive to minner
if total suply bitcoin 21 million, bitcoin price incraese, so miner can still competitif return

There are long time to consider this, at that time the price will be a number your can't image ;)
So the tx fee will be enough to protect bitcoin network.

We are at "Percentage of total Bitcoins mined": 77.04% and the remaining 4 millions will experience another Halving which lowers the 12 BTC reward down to 6 BTC. So 6x as of now to exspect but I am not sure if one can estimate numbers in such ways.
And if 6 BTC even can fuel the existing miner infrastructure, don't know either.
If using Bitcoin gets expensive we are loosing a serious advantage in comparison to competition out there.

Bitcoin should be more worth by the next halving, so you get just 6.25 instead of 12.5, but the price went up to even it out and also your fees are higher and more worth. Of course you have to put some of your earnings aside shortly before the halving and make some losses after the halving, but the price will adapt quickly.
But maybe fees will get so high, that it will not be interesting to use Bitcoin as any other thing then store of value, used by the rich, so an occasional big fee will be no problem.

They will get all fee associated in all transaction that will be included in that block. Obviously reward will be very low than what it is right now per block but in future demand for bitcoin will be high and supply will be limited which will increase price per coin. So even <0.50BTC per block will be enough reward for miners.

No, you didn't because with already little basic effort you'd have your answer already.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=71176.0
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/18103/what-happens-when-the-21-million-cap-is-reached (marked as duplicate!)
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/5275/what-will-happen-to-mining-after-the-20-999-999th-bitcoin
https://news.bitcoin.com/what-happens-bitcoin-miners-all-coins-mined/

etc. I could go on and on and this post - including my bunch of research - took me less than 5 minutes.


Rico

You've made a great selection of related articles on the subject, but still I think it's interesting to see what people of this forum think right now. So I think creating this topic wasn't pointless.

IMO miners will still do their job in order to collect transaction fees. Bitcoin will be used by almost everyone by that time so even the $0.2 transaction fee will be enough to generate hundreds of millions of dollars per day in fees alone.

Yes, transactions will still need to be processed somehow, so miners won't be left without a job.
And, till 21m are released, we still have time to figure out what to do next and make Bitcoin more mainstream. End of Bitcoin issuing is not the end of the world.

There are already 21 million bitcoin in circulation and that means that there are actually 21 millions bitcoin that are released to the market and to the public to use. But I get what you are talking about you are referring to the maximum number of bitcoin to be mined and released to the public. If all bitcoin was released the miners will continue to mine and the incentive they will get is still the miners fee of course.

well after 21 million bitcoin released into the market people (user and miners) will have to just circulate the available bitcoin and day by day due to increase in its demand price will will touch the sky and transaction would be in terms of satoshi not 0.0000001btc instead it will be so called like 100 satoshi which is far standard.

we've seen how transaction costs are increasing that is what will be used in the future when 21 million bitcoin has been completed is found in mining, I think the miners will benefit from any transaction costs at least there may be little other large companies grow to mining bitcoin future

Then there will no more coin to mine. miners only mine for fees and I bet that the prices are high enough so that the miners can live with fees. We expect that the prices will reach more than $1000000 after finishing the mining process. or maybe Bitcoin will be destroyed since no one want to use Bitcoin anymore because there are too many good cryptos outside