Bitcoin Forum

When the last BTC is mined around 2140, what happens to the whole ecosystem? I mean, there won't be anymore incentives for the miners to verify and confirm transactions, right? The only reason miners confirm the transactions in the whole BTC ecosystem is to be rewarded with more BTC. No more BTC reward, no confirmations. Thoughts?

Will we even have bitcoin until then? Will we still be living on earth? 2140 is so far away that it is meaningless to theorize about what might happen to bitcoin then. In fact, I'm fairly sure bitcoin will not be around in 2140.

You can search PoS(Proof of Stake) for answer that you're looking for. Also another answer is transaction fees. They will not be enough for incentives. If fees will be enough, it would be a big problem, isn't it? It's against basic of Bitcoin ecosystem. Hopefully our children will find too many solutions for this problem because they will have our Bitcoins :)

The incentive will come in form of transaction fees.

Right now the block reward is the lion share of mining profits. Within 3-4 halvings however, you can expect transaction fees becoming the main mining income. This also leads to contentious hardforks such as we see today to become harder and harder to pull off, because in the end actual transaction throughput will define which chain is the most profitable to mine.



Proof of stake is a wholly different approach and has nothing to do with BTC.

Miners also get transaction fees to include your transaction into the the block. By that time the price of Bitcoin should be high enough to compensate the block reward with transaction fees. I don't think it will be a problem, also because Bitcoin has an algorithm that adjusts the difficulty to the current hashrate it happens every 2016 blocks. If a lot of miners would quit, then mining would become more profitable because there is less hashpower.