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Title: where will TX fees go once difficulty reaches 0? Post by: temporalcausality on April 24, 2013, 08:01:36 PM So, i've been mining for a couple years now and just had a thought. Currently tx fees go to miners as an extra sort of bonus for each block mined.
When difficulty reaches 0, and the blockchain has all 21 million blocks, who will the tx fees go to? Title: Re: where will TX fees go once difficulty reaches 0? Post by: Kruncha on April 24, 2013, 08:05:26 PM It goes up, not down. The reward will always go to the miners, they'll still be needed to create secure transactions. By then transaction fees will be substantially higher, creating a never ending resource for miners.
K. Title: Re: where will TX fees go once difficulty reaches 0? Post by: avabit on April 24, 2013, 08:08:03 PM The transaction fees wouldn't necessarily be higher, but likely more valuable as bitcoins become more adopted. The difficulty changes based on the hash rate of the network and adjusts to ensure that a block is mined roughly every 10 minutes.
Title: Re: where will TX fees go once difficulty reaches 0? Post by: Akka on April 24, 2013, 08:09:53 PM So, i've been mining for a couple years now and just had a thought. Currently tx fees go to miners as an extra sort of bonus for each block mined. When difficulty reaches 0, and the blockchain has all 21 million blocks, who will the tx fees go to? Sure you know how Bitcoin works? Hint: 21 Million Blocks? Title: Re: where will TX fees go once difficulty reaches 0? Post by: Foxpup on April 26, 2013, 09:50:28 AM I'm going to assume you mean when the block reward reaches 0 and all 21 million coins have been mined, in which case transaction fees continue to go to the miners just as they always have. Good thing too, since that's what motivates miners to continue mining past that point. Note that the purpose of mining is to secure the network, not to produce new coins; new coins are just a (temporary) side benefit to bootstrap the whole process. Once all coins have been mined, miners will be paid purely in transaction fees, ie, Bitcoin will be supported on a pure "user pays" basis.
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