Bitcoin Forum

I don't know how many bitcoin miners are currently mining bitcoin. But, I guess that the majority of cryptocurrency miners are mining bitcoin. It is expected that the last bitcoin will be mined around year 2140. There will be no block rewards for bitcoin miners after that and only transaction fees can be collected by miners for verifying the bitcoin transactions.

In order to be profitable for miners, transaction fees have to be increased by a significant amount by 2140. The issue with higher transaction fees is people may be discouraged to use bitcoin which may cause a reduction in bitcoin transactions.

Then, will it be profitable to miners to verify transactions? Will miners leave bitcoin?

I am not sure how this will work. What do you think?



EDIT: I think I posted the topic in wrong section. Mods please move this to Mining->Speculation.

This question is asked at least every week.... Does no one even bother to scan the topics to see if their query has already been answered? Apparently not.
ref https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3411737.msg35684290#msg35684290

I didn't see that topic. I could have asked as a secondary question there if I saw that topic. It's also not possible. It's a locked topic. I changed the title of this topic. Now it is more clear about what I am asking.

Anyway, my question is a different one. I know that there will be just TX fees.

My question is will it be profitable to miners just to verify transactions and will it be profitable for miners to verify bitcoin transactions if there is a reduction in bitcoin transactions due to high TX fees as people may discouraged to use bitcoin with considerably high fees.

You planning to be alive then? I know I won't be so the question is purely academic.

In the interim Tx fees will rise to cover costs. Don't forget that during the last price spike in Dec. some Tx fees were almost equal to the block rewards.

Other than as a wild guess this query cannot be answered with 'yes' or 'no'. The only correct answer has to be 'it depends'.
It is academic because there are far too many undefined variables such as:

• What will be the cost of power in their area? As is the case now, some folks are screwed, some make money hand over fist.
• What will be the major currency or exchange medium then?
• Will civilization even exist?

Assuming all the above are good I DID answer this query with, 'In the interim Tx fees will rise to cover costs' though you apparently missed that line...
Happy now?

Bitcoin was always supposed to wind up where transaction fees covered the cost of mining. That's one of the reasons the block reward reduces over time, and also why Bitcoins are infinitely divisible. The price of bitcoins can only either go up indefinitely or drop to zero, and if it goes up indefinitely the fees will cover the cost of mining.

If the fees don't, miners will drop out and the difficulty will decrease and the proportional cost of processing one block will decrease such that the fees cover the cost for the remaining miners.

The only potential issue with that is, for fees to remain low on a per-transaction basis (absolute, not relative low) blocks will have to take in more transactions so the total fee payout on a per-block basis is maintained while the per-transaction fees stay reasonable. Hence the block size debate which I don't know has actually been settled to everyone's satisfaction yet, and I think prompted some of last year's forking around. Because larger blocks require increased bandwidth and decreased network latency times to propagate properly and that can hurt some parts of the world with poor or massively firewalled connections to the general global backbone.

But assuming those issues are solved in the next century or so to everyone's satisfaction, yes, the transaction fees will cover the cost of mining, as long as there are still miners willing and able to mine for those fees.

This is silly, since its pure speculation, but at least its in the right forum.

The real question should be "Will it be profitable for ME (with my power cost, my capital cost, my labor cost, my government taxes) to mine bitcoin only for TX fees.  Of course, that is not possible to answer with any certainty at all...