Bitcoin Forum

Seeing the current fuss going on in the markets and the buzz that Bitcoin may lose its value down more to $1-2k levels (without any solid reasons except we may call this the biggest shake of investors' confidence), what do you really expect when the last Bitcoin gets mined?

I've got 2 things in my mind I'd like to share:

- Miners will push the fee higher and higher if the value drops (and even if it doesn't, they'll probably do the same because there won't be any rewards for the same and they'll not serve us for lower, maybe). So, after the hike in fee values, will there be the same clutter and people would sell BTC and choose some other alt for their money-making needs?

- Miners will completely stop mining BTC which would give us the chance to mine it with our PCs once again (maybe) and/or people might completely stop using BTC because there maybe a sudden drop in price (like we expected a price jump but it dropped like hell just because last BTC mined and mining fee hike as said in first scenario).

At the end of the day, miners only really care about fiat value. Thats why they're still mining even after the rewards have been halved a lot more since bitcoin first started, and that's why they'll keep doing so in the future.

By the time the last bitcoin is mined, the price would have "slowly" adjusted to keep it interesting for them, just like it did after the last two halvenings. If it keeps increasing at the same pace then it's completely plausible that a fee only network, will provide the same, and maybe even a lot more miner incentive than today, IN FIAT.

Good discussion. I understand a lot about Bitcoin but how the system will work after all Bitcoins have been mined is vague at best.

It is my understanding that....
The difficulty adjusts after 2016 blocks making it easier or harder depending on the hashrate of miners.
Mining will be done for the fees.
At each block someone gets the fees.

I would believe that the system will wither down to a balance between miners and transactions.
Mining pools are the only way to get your piece of the fees.

The only problematic thing is the blockchain getting longer and longer making it impracticle to run a full node.



Anyhow it would be great for a specialist to provide us with a view on the OP's question

1. I fully expect all of us to be gone by then. It's 120 years into the future...

2. The fees will become an increasingly important part of the miner reward after each halving. Bitcoin has been designed with that in mind form day 1.

3. Miners will never completely stop all at once. Think of it this way. Lets say a particular highway has terrible traffic jams. And some drivers choose to avoid it. If everyone stopped using it, it would be empty, making it a super excellent choice. And drivers start using it again. But you never get to that extreme, because the system balances out way before that i.e. people stop avoiding the highway once the traffic is moderate. It's the same with mining. Miners who don't like the reward keep dropping out, the rewards are distributed among less people who now get more. This continues until everyone is happy with the situation. You never get to zero...

A really important thing to consider in your thinking is how efficient mining will likely be at that point. There will be much higher hash power and potentially a renewable and cheap energy source.

It's hard to fully predict what will happen because for the first time, bitcoin mining difficulty and cost won't be tied to the price of bitcoin via supply. But it will somewhat be linked still due to the (currently) limited number of transactions that can fit in to one block. Again however, that's subject to change, I don't see how bitcoin can still be used in 100+ years with the current scalibility issues still existing.

I don't believe we will have to wait to 2140 to see the impact of zero block rewards.

The Reward per Block becomes irrelevant after 6th or 7th halving or in the Year 2032 or 2036 (Approx) and more irrelevant thereafter. In fact, the fees generated will be more than the block rewards.

Miners are not the ones who are pushing fees higher. It is the demand for BTC confirmations that determines the fees. More transactions on the network, the more fees you will have to pay to be included in the next block. We recently witness this during the last half of 2017.

Will the fees be enough to sustain the mining activity? We will find out in Year 2032.

Either block sizes will be keep small to ensure higher transaction fees and Layer 2 Scaling will be the norm and BTC onchain will be used as a settlement layer.

Or Block sizes are increase to allow more transactions to be included in a block, hence a larger transaction fee.

Currently the average transaction fee per bock is about 0.25BTC per block and average block size is about 80%. Guestimate the value of BTC in 20 years from now and do the calculations. It will be worth it for miners!

Also, i don't believe we will ever be mining with our PC's ever again! I'll just fire up my S1's and dominate the hashrate :)

I believe that Bitcoin had been an all time favorite for the past 2 halvenings due to the fact that there were less miners and profit used to be more in less difficulty, the value was low but it was profitable even when they were mining during the sub 250s. It is still profitable if we see it in terms of fiat, but not if we calculate based on what we need to pay for an equipment as well as the difficulty that's rising day by day.



I believe there will again be two things possible:

Either miners will keep up with their job and support the blockchain system without eliminating their hash power as if the value of BTC rises based on the confidence of both investors and miners, it'll then be highly profitable to both the ends.

OR Big miners may decide to go on for a 51% attack (the only thing possible if low-level miners stop mining and hash rate drops to some unexpected levels) and harm the network. This is the least possiblity as there won't be any advantage to them if they try to manipulate the chain by mining empty blocks.

I actually half thought that miners, or at least the huge firms we've come to know and hate (heh), would already have taken steps to move in temporarily as market makers in the current pricing, but instead they've chosen to shut down operations and hold out, while others have chosen to mine at a loss. There's some consequence of this I'll feel, as supply on markets thin (miners holding out), then the natural pressure from demand should kick in a little.

Bear in mind most miners will have already made their profits the entire of last year and this, so there's a healthy cushion for them to wait this out.

The latter scenario would be scary because if miners stop and move out, then the network loses its much-touted security. Too big too fail, too much to lose? Should hold true for a good number of years.

It's only logical honestly. As a miner, if you decide to turn them off, I figure the next step is one of two things : You're going to cash out in fear of further losses, or you're going to hodl waiting for the profit to go back up and mine again to get your ROI in whatever time you calculated when the price was high. Miners are the last people to rely on to pump the price, because price pumps only happen when massive fiat money enters the market, which leads to FOMO and massive pumps.


 :D

We can argue about something what will maybe happen around year 2140 ( if BTC still exist then ), but it is a distant future that we will not experience so that is not our problem. Almost 99% of all BTC will be mined around the year 2032, and that 1% which will remain for next 100 years in fact will not be too important.

Miners will mine as long as there is profit in it, they are not charitable institutions and will never behave like that. When rewards per block become lower miners will need to find other ways to generate income, and besides rewards from blocks only mining fees remain as solution.

If in the next 10-15 years the number of transactions increases significantly, then miners should get some profit from that. It is also necessary to consider the price of electricity, development of the mining devices - respectively total costs of mining compared to earnings.

If the transaction volumes stays the same, miners will get more from fees than the block reward in 10-15 years...

I do not know why when a small shake occurs, all start to panic like this. The miners will decide to stop mining when BTC falls to zero.
When we talk about the fixed assets of the "mining machinery", the change in activity takes a long time and the miners have plans in the event of price collapse. "Those plans do not include abandoning mining."
This decline occurred about 10 days ago so panic and thinking that way is funny as the price did not drop to cumbersome levels.

Remember those miners get lots of free forked coins.

Oversmart, eh?
I've tried to adjoin this situation with possible future outcome when the last BTC gets mined, I've never said anything like I'm posting this under the panic effect, all I've done here is taken this dip as an example as it sits fit for the debate I wanted to discuss here.


False. Miners will stop mining when BTC becomes less profitable / unprofitable, they'll look for other options.


May this be true to some extent, but what about those influencing personalities over the web who're trying to trash off BTC's value by saying they would dump their stash? People really get panicked with all such FUD by these people and I believe it doesn't really suit their credibility to bark off such ^personal^ things in public.


Once again, it's about the "last Bitcoin mined" thing and we're not discussing the current decline here, I guess you gave your comment under the panic attack.  :P


The only thing I agree upon.

OP, this is a very touchy topic for the Maximalists, and to suggest something like a hard fork to inflate the monetary supply is blasphemy.

But my theory is someone, a "Bitcoin OG", will campaign for a hard fork to increase inflation without increasing the monetary supply, if the price remains low and the block rewards halve to 3.125 on 2024.

It starts there, and it will not be the end of it.

He never promoted intentional forking. BCH and BCHSV don't exist in the intention of pleasing miners, but when those forks DID happen, miners instantly had their coins doubled. Would they continue mining blocks for either chain is on them, but it still doesn't deny it's free money overnight.

While I'm skeptical about your "theory", and your "bitcoin OG" (Is the real satoshi going to rise from his cybergrave? lol), I can't say I'm not excited about the future. It's because bitcoin has immense value in the experience it has. Every other coin out there hasn't nearly had as many problems as bitcoin, mainly because of the sheer scale it's reached. We've seen dozens of forks, many hard ones, we have tx scaling, performance issues we're trying to solve through lightning... there's just so much trial and error that happened with bitcoin, and that's STILL going to happen in the future that -compared to other new coins who haven't gotten to that point yet- makes it one of the most valuable coins.

If there is a demand for bitcoin, there will be transactions on the mempool ready to be mined. If you are not doing it, then I will do it an get the rewards, and if it's not economically viable for me, then someone else on the planet will find profit. Bitcoin is a global phenomenon, there's 7 billion people out there. Some of them will always find themselves in a position where they find profit by getting the job done of mining these transactions. Hashrate may go up and down as price fluctuates but I don't see how it can collapse, since as I said someone will always find profit.

As far as the end of rewards, i've seen something proposed that satoshi's bitcoins are re-introduced into the economy by adding them in the next million blocks, so that's 1 extra bitcoin from satoshi's coins for the next million blocks, so you get rid of the "satoshi is moving coins" FUD.

Of course there will be heavy resistance to such a proposal, since the main point of bitcoin is that coins never move unless owner wants to. It's a tricky situation.

Miners can't unilaterally push fees higher unless they agree to restrict block size with a soft fork. That seems unlikely at this point, given what happened last year. The only way it would happen is if one entity controlled a majority of the hash rate and implemented the soft limit themselves.

However, if the long term uptrend holds and adoption continues, we can also expect fees to rise with no action from miners. In a situation of scarce block space and increasing demand for that block space, rising fees should compensate miners for the falling mining subsidy. Or it should at least soften the blow and prevent difficulty from plummeting.

At that time Bitcoin will be a global currency and the value of Bitcoin will be increased much more than we can expect so in that time even the mining fees will work better for the miners and the crypto community will be the rich community and they will be able to afford the fees and a smaller fraction of fees will be a bigger amount for the miners.

The "OG" might be a developer, a miner, or a whale-cumulator like Barry Silbert.

By 2024 on the halving to 3.125 rewards per block, and on the condition that Bitcoin's price has not increased high enough to support the miners' operating costs, someone will campaign for a fork to increase inflation, but without increasing the monetary supply to "save Bitcoin".

It will be another big drama same as the scalability debate.

I hope you understood my point this time.

Theoretically speaking the last bitcoin will not be mined forever, it will be taking a lot longer compared to your life expectancy. Hence, you should not worry about it.

However if you are worrying about the transactions and the miners and what will happen to network when the reward gets smaller, the possibility we have right now is the transaction fee's are getting more frequent instead of more expensive. Hence miners are making more money thanks to more volume in each block and they are getting a lot of reward for it.

They may need to increase the price of bitcoin in order to make it better but honestly we already have a lot of bitcoin miners and transactions are getting a lot faster with lightning network thing coming up. Hence everyone will live happily ever after without a worry.

Ok, on the nining issue and miners deciding to suspend operations, would this
encourage small timers to start mining?
If i was going to go mining i wouldnt be looking at the cost of mining now but
at the potential future value.
That future value would more than compensate for todays mining cost, have
I got it wrong?

I'm intrigued on the "how" part of "increasing inflation without increasing the monetary supply". But I'm not going to argue that future is going to bring a lot of surprises for bitcoin, it's not unlikely for drama to happen and I've even written a paragraph about this in my last post.

As far as I know the last bitcoin will be mined at 2140 so at that time we already have the clear knowledge about the crypto currency payment,if we still have bitcoins in use then miners won't stop because they will still get their rewards through the fees at that time the rewards will be lot higher when compared to the expenses.

I'd like the first option to rule though, if miners push for higher fees then its assume the price will also rise up but if PCs or GPUS can once again mine btc then price will eventually collapse. All will be moving to another crypto but don't you think you are going ahead among the rest here? Its years and years away.

What is the point of discussing this if it happens around 2140 and none of us will live to that time? Most likely, nothing significant will happen. However, most likely, the situation will change dramatically in 120 years and the last bitcoin will be extracted much earlier, or the need for this will disappear for various reasons, including due to changes in cryptocurrency technology and technical capabilities.

By calling out the developers to make a controversial hard fork, and change the rules to maintain the block rewards to the amount of 6.25 instead halving to 3.125 on 2024.

I believe that "drama" will be as big as the scalability debate. 8)

The number of Bitcoin supply is limited and we are restricted to go on with it and such fork will eventually give born to another "Bitcoin-TRash" and even if they don't change the supply but come up with a code that applies over miners to get double rewards, it'll be unfair to those who've mined till date with the current ongoing rules.

To those of you who think we can't live till 2140, think twice before saying that. It's our destiny and we may even live up to a 100 years if our will power is strong enough, so discussing about value of BTC after final BTC getting mined will not really harm anybody's emotions.

We cannot debate on the finer details of the theory. But the point is that there is going to be a Bitcoin "OG", or a miner that might call for a hard fork to maintain the block reward to 6.25 on the halving of 2024, if the value of Bitcoin can't support the costs of mining anymore.

For the fun of it. But also, the effects should be felt much sooner than that. For supply inflation, the differences between 50-->25-->12.5-->6.25-->3.125 reward is drastically larger than 0.0488-->0.0244-->0.0122-->0.0061 and so on.

Nearly 83% of the supply has already been mined, so the question is becoming increasingly relevant.

I'm sure that most of the people here are so stressed out about the bear market and their paper losses, and will continue to be during the next cycles, that they lost and will continue to lose a couple of years worth of their life.

In all fairness, most of the price growth that Bitcoin is going through is well beyond what it is actually worth, so no doubt the price will continue to follow what it has been doing since the very beginning.

The past is all we have, and as time goes by, it turns out that the past is the best indicator of what will be happening in the future. It doesn't have to be a 1:1 movement, the fact that the movements rhyme tells me enough.

Anyone can do that. All we need is a donation address where to send Bitcoins we gather to pay miners. YAY. We only need to collect like 12 BTC per 10 minutes.

Or else, they might come up with the same BTC concept like many different Bitcoin clones did, but the only difference would be the price and block reward size. I don't know what will be the meaning of that to happen because the change in the reward size will only make it more closer to the last BTC as the reward size will remain the same and if it gets applied to the original (current) BTC that we use, then I don't think it'll take 2140 to reach there but much sooner than that. I guess the breach of rules already set by Satoshi won't really work for BTC as the pattern and protocol should go hand in hand as they've been going since last decade (though, if the community feels and decides based on mutual consent of everyone that this should happen for miners to carry on mining, I guess nobody could stop it from happening).

Why do it as a "donation"? Everyone can do it by sending Bitcoins and pay $50 per transaction. Haha.

Which also makes me believe that the network spammer will be back to flood the mempool again, increasing the fees, and create more "drama".

That is a pretty dark bombshell to throw in just like that. I could agree that technologically, bitcoin could be behind newer coins that offer more features. But if that were the cause of its devaluation, it should have happened way before it hit 20k, so why do you think that bitcoin is over-valuated while we're at 3k, even though we've actually hit 20?

IMHO BTC must raise popularity to increase the number of transactions and this will raise the sum of fees and this will be enough for miners.

Increase in the number of transactions will only bring scalability issues back due to clogs in mempool, I think that's something which will automatically rise once BTC gains mass adoption from at least a 100 countries fully in favor of BTC. And there's one more thing, people are here because they are getting lesser fees compared to any services online which charge us anywhere between $10 - $100 and even more in order to send money anywhere without the heed of boundaries. BTC gives everyone the opportunity to transact freely and almost for free, so keeping fees high will also be harmful for BTC's value as most people here are interested in making the best of their money - either trading and making money or saving over fees while sending money anywhere in the world.

It seems to me, that no one currently living will see the last mined Bitcoin ..
From the economic side, whenever the supply of an item ends, its price increases incredible (Stradiwarius violin).
On the technical side - technology is moving forward so fast that before the last Bitcoin is mined, i'm sure that will be created Bitcoin 2, or even Bitcoin 3. Miners will move to mine new "BTCs" and there will be not enough power to mine the last Bitcoin.

Lolz, so haven't you seen the already up BTC 2.0 or 3.0? Bitcoin TRash, Bitcoin Diamond, Bitcoin Gold, etc. and many other forks off Bitcoin are not to be considered as other type of BTC with some upgraded/enhanced coding according to their devs? Aren't you aware of the fact that those who were mining BTC (giants), publicly warned and wanted everyone to drive their hash towards BCH? I guess nothing in this world would be able to snatch the power of BTC in terms of mining, and even if it does, it won't remain profitable for longer time (at least not for a decade in its own genre of SHA256 category).

Honestly the bitcoin has reached a level of adoption so massive it's really hard to dethrone it anymore. A lot of people mine bitcoin just because it's the most used coin in the market with a lot of options to exchange into "real" money. And it helps that miners couldn't give half an ass about whatever drama is going on.

So regardless of whatever drama occurs, there can only be two scenarios :

1. A hard fork occurs with massive consensus to completely DROP chains that don't commit to the fork. The "consensus" part can only happen if there's some major security risk involved with old bitcoin, or if there is some huge improvement in the new chain.

2. Another "BCH drama". Any kind of issue that doesn't have consensual feedback from the vast majority of nodes (51% isn't even close), will always end up with 2 coins, the forked one, and bitcoin.