Bitcoin Forum

I read that bitcoin has a limit of 21million blocks and after that miners can earn income from fees?
I understand that blocks contain transactions.
After 21million if no more blocks are created, then where will the new transactions be recorded?
Thanks so much

You misheared... There is no limit how many blocks will ever be mined. However, the block reward will halve every ~4 years, so in the end there will be just under 21.000.000 BTC in circulation. (altough, many of those unspent outputs are funding addresses whose private key belong to satoshi, or to people that have lost them, so eventough there are potentially 21 mln BTC in circulation, only a small fraction of those is actually "spendable"). Miners can still mine after the block reward has dropped to 0, they can mine to collect the sum of the fees of all transactions they include in the block they're trying to solve.

After 21 mln  mined, miners will have only transaction fees reward, but it will be after 150 years. maybe btc die before this

Blocks will be created, there is no limit on blocks. And yes, miners will earn income from fees.

Do not worry because the volume is 21 million Bitcoins and this does not mean that it is the amount of Block created. The miner will perform transactions, the miner is responsible for creating the block and performing trades to help the entire system operate.

It looks like you should correct the statement above. 21 million is the total supply of bitcoins instead of the total blocks that can be mine. The block is not limited precisely the blocks are made continuously, the bigger the block the difficulty is also higher for the miners. Hope you helped

After 21 million Bitcoin has totally mined, blocks will never disappear, because there are no limits on blocks that will be mined because blocks is where transactions are being recorded and being mined to confirm every transactions on Bitcoin network, the only thing that will disappear after all supply gets mined is the block rewards that is being awarded to miners on each successfully mined block. And after that, miners will only have to rely on transaction fees, we still don't know if it will be profitable for them, if not there will surely be a huge decrease of Bitcoin miners.

After 21 million Bitcoin has totally mined, blocks will never disappear, because there are no limits on blocks that will be mined because blocks is where transactions are being recorded and being mined to confirm every transactions on Bitcoin network, the only thing that will disappear after all supply gets mined is the block rewards that is being awarded to miners on each successfully mined block. And after that, miners will only have to rely on transaction fees, we still don't know if it will be profitable for them, if not there will surely be a huge decrease of Bitcoin miners.

As mentioned above there is no block limit. Fee problems won't be a problem for a very long time as we are reaching 17,000,000 Bitcoins mined today.

It requires so long time so do not worry about that. In theory our Sun will also be shut down but nobody worries about that  :) I think the more suitable question - what to do with lost BTC (like lost private keys and etc)

I fail to see what the total number of bitcoins in circulation has to do with fee problems... Could you explain the link here?


https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply
We're currently in reward era 3 (we're about ~2 years into this era).
The block reward will be 0 at the end of era 33...
So, a raw estimation would be that the block reward becomes 0 satoshi in ~120 years... At this point, all ~21 million BTC will be in circulation and miners will be rewarded with the sum of the transaction fees in the blocks they mine.

This is long before our sun shuts down (AFAIK).

Or am i missing something here...

The second part of your answer is actually quite interesting. Personally, i don't think that lost private keys are a problem, the more people lose their keys, the less BTC is actually being traded, the higher the price for the btc in my wallet will be  ;D

At the moment, the smallest denomination is 1 satoshi. This is 0.00000001 BTC. However, theoretically, if all but 1 BTC would be lost it would still not be be a problem... We could just change the smallest denomination to 1 millisatoshi (or something) so you could send 0.00000000001 BTC to somebody if you wanted to. At this point, the theoretical BTC price would probably be > 150 billion USD/BTC, so my 1 microsatoshi would still be the equivalent of $15 if you traded your microsatoshi for FIAT.

I have said this on many threads regarding the 21 million bitcoin supply and I’ll say it again. I believe that the supply and demand concept will come into play. As you may know recently bitcoin has been booming all over the world through the news and the internet. It’s just a matter of time before all the bitcoin is mined although you must note that it is less then 21 million because of people losing their wallets so not all of the bitcoin can be transacted. Hopefully in the future there will be technology get into locked wallets quickly without waiting a year. The absolute transactable supply is probably likely to be more like 15M by the time the total is reached.