Bitcoin Forum

Hi, so I have been doing some research about crypto and I think I am starting to get it XD I only have one main question now:
What will happen if there are no more bitcoin transactions for some reason? Will mining even be possible then?
As I  understand bitcoin mining is essentially verifying transactions, so thats why Im wondering what will happen if there are no transactions to verify.

Thx in advance

(Edit: missed a word :/)

Mining goes on and creates more blocks every ~10 minutes whether there are transactions to process or not.
How you think it was in the early days of Bitcoin? Just look at the blockchain and you'll see how many empty blocks were mined. And even today, empty blocks are not that rare.

Ohh, so if there are transactions they just get verified, but if there are none, empty ones are generated. I assume that if there are transactions to verify mining goes faster, because  you dont have to wait 10 min for a new block?

A very interesting question. Nowadays miners have a clear incentive to mine even an empty block without transactions because they still receive a reward for finding a block. They construct a special transaction called coinbase transaction with which they pay to themselves with block subsidy (currently 6.25 bitcoin) plus transaction fees. If there are no transactions then it means there is no additional reward in the form of transaction fees, but block subsidy still exists. After 2140 there will be no block subsidy anymore, so in the case of the absence of transactions, miners will have no incentive to mine empty blocks. The network will stop for some time or I am missing something.

Here is an explanation of how mining works https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/mastering-bitcoin/9781491902639/ch08.html

Ok thank you! I am slowly starting  to understand how this works. So like I have it now, after all the bitcoin is mined, mining will be a lot less profitable because no empty blocks will be created, AND you will only be able to take the fee from a transaction as payment, instead of the minting that you can do now with all blocks.

if there are no transactions. then bitcoin is already dead.
if there are transactions then bitcoin is still useful.
once the reward depletes miners are less incentivised to mine PURPOSEFULLY empty blocks just for the reward because there wont be a reward, so they only get paid by adding in transactions.

obviously if there are no users making transactions. and thus no miners wanting to mine for free. the blockchain just halts and stops building on itself.

bitcoin remains useful to users if its affordable to users. it txfee's become stupidly expensive because of limited amount of possible transactions. that will deter usage. and thus shoot miners in the foot.
..
imagine user preference is a max of $2/tx before they move away from using bitcoin.
a block that only holds 2000tx average is only $4k fee total

gentle progression of more transaction count capacity per block ensures that the overall block cost does not have to be met by only 2000 transactions. but progressively 4000tx, 8000 16,000 thus keeping fee's low and keeping bitcoin useful, while combining the fees to award more to miners.. ($8k, $16k, $32k respectively, while individual users still only pay $2 each)

other factors are that there are about 1.5millions asics (distributed within ~20 pools)right now..  where by if transactions become lax we may see many asics drop off EG 1m asics in 13 pools... then 500k asics in 6 pools.
the 'share' of the fee's can be shared between less people meaning each miner gets more of the share
eventually if transactions become so infrequent, it may become only 3 asics running by 3 people who can just about afford to keep mining.
(the difficulty adjusts depending on how many asics are hashing and solving blocks too quick or too slowly)

Ok! What you said makes a lot of sense. Thank you all for your input :)

No. It makes no difference to the time it takes to mine a block if that block contains zero transactions or 5,000 transactions. The expected average time to the next block is always 10 minutes.

Not quite. It's not like after the last halving that mining suddenly becomes less profitable. The block subsidy will half every 210,000 blocks for the next ~120 years. It's a very gradual process by which the block subsidy contributes less and less to the total block reward and the total fees contribute more and more to the total block reward.

An additional incentive for miners to mine empty blocks may come in the form of them wanting to add confirmations to previous transactions or unlock their block rewards from previous blocks, which cannot be spent until they have 100 confirmations.

Okkk, the block thing I think I understand now. So blocks can contain any amount of transactions, and are made at a certain interval.

The fees will surely be less than the block subsidy gives now though? And the empty blocks wont give any bitcoin, but then just be used to get more confirmations.

If I may, Id like to ask another question: How I understand it, a person gets the "right" to confirm a block if he wins the race to solve the math equation. How does this stop him from corrupting that block? Isnt he still able to potentially change the contents of the block if he wins the race. Does someone check HIM up?

At the moment the block subsidy is 6.25 BTC, and the fees are generally somewhere in the region of 0.1 - 0.2 BTC. Empty blocks can still claim the full 6.25 BTC subsidy, but obviously have no fees to collect.

Somewhere near the start of 2024, the block subsidy will half to 3.125 BTC. 210,000 blocks after that (approximately 4 years), it will half again to 1.5625 BTC. And so on, until it becomes 0 around 2140. Mining an empty block will become unprofitable long before 2140 though. For a period of 40 years before that, the block subsidy will be less than 1000 sats, for instance.

The problem they are trying to solve is based on the block itself. There are countless possible solutions for each and every block which is mined. A miner must first construct a block they want to mine (which we call a candidate block), and then solve the necessary problems using that block, and the solution that they find will be unique to their candidate block. Once they find a solution, if they then change the contents of their candidate block the solution will no longer be correct and they would have to start from scratch. The miner then broadcasts their block and the solution to the rest of the network. The rest of the network then examine the block and the solution to verify it all checks out. It someone broadcasts a corrupted or otherwise invalid block, then the rest of the network will simply reject it.

Wow! Ok thx for the answer, I appreciate it a lot. Im done asking things for now, so I hope you have a good day/night!

Think of Bitcoin mining not so much verifying transactions and more like trying to crack a code.  Once the code is cracked, you get a block reward and can add transactions to the blockchain.  You don't HAVE to add transactions to the blockchain, you can just take the block reward and leave the mempool (unprocessed transactions) for the next guy who cracks the code to worry about.

So the amount of transactions included in the block have nothing to do with solving the block "code" and getting the reward.  However, if you want to increase your reward, you will include transactions and receive those transaction fees as well.  No transactions to include?  No sweat.  Lots of transactions to include?  Include whatever you want or nothing at all. 

Here is an example of an empty block that was mined today earlier today - https://mempool.space/block/000000000000000000057b946ab19b139fbe58a70de0dbfe1fe179281f4568c7 (it only contains one transaction which is the coinbase transaction)

Let's assume nobody made a bitcoin transaction today and the mempool was empty. New empty blocks would still continue to get confirmed in approximately every 10 minutes with miners only earning via block rewards

the topic creator was mentioning a scenario of in 2140 when the reward is zero. where the income for miners is very much 100% based on transaction income. where he then asks of a scenario where there are no transactions in mempool to choose from.

The problem is with your wrong definition. Mining has nothing to do with verifying transactions. A node performs the verification and block construction while the miner only performs the expensive work. That work is essentially computing a lot of hashes (like a brute force attack) to find a result that satisfies the PoW requirement.
Any bitcoin block must have at least one transaction, which is the coinbase transaction (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Coinbase) that can create the new coins (the block reward). In other words it is optional to include additional transactions.

The number of transactions that can fit into one block is not very easy to calculate because it will depend on many factors that determine the size of each particular transaction (which transaction type P2PKH, P2WPKH, P2SH, P2WSH, or P2TR, how many inputs and outputs it has, etc.). Also, blocks are made at random intervals, but the average interval tends to be close to ten minutes.

Here is the paradox, if bitcoin lives up to the time when it is no longer profitable to mine empty blocks, there will be no empty blocks because of the mere fact bitcoin survived.

You have already been answered, but I just want to add that it is the decentralized network (not the miner himself) that decides whether or not a particular miner has a right to add a block to the chain of blocks. If a miner violates the consensus rules by tampering with the block he found, the network will consider him unworthy of the right to add a block and receive a reward for it.

For interest's sake, the highest number of transactions in a single block is 12,239 in block 367,853 (https://blockchair.com/bitcoin/block/367853).

I understand the point you are making, but I think this is a bad way to word it when considering newbies will be reading it. Saying that a specific miner is "unworthy of the right to add a block" makes it sound like that miner is somehow blacklisted or permanently removed from the network, which is not the case. The block is simply rejected by the first nodes which see it and is not relayed through the rest of the network. Only if an individual miner started spamming invalid blocks in some kind of DDoS attempt would the mining pool it is part of (or other nodes) start to block it.

for factual interests sake it was not 12,239 transactions
it was a heck of alot of 'dead end' data without a payer address and without a receive address

thus not a true example of bitcoins ability to actually TRANSACT (value transfer)

here is one such example of the 'dead end' data
https://www.blockchain.com/btc/tx/3e064b3f2d303c0ff78180ffe76e99a0d9032d406c9ff2df40077b1976c56a57
nothing in -- nothing out

there were only actually 442 transactions (with a utxo paying out to an actual address) in that block

And yet, a transaction is not defined by the need for a payer address not a receiving address, nor by the amount being transferred nor the fee paid. All the transactions in that block are still valid transactions as per the protocol and were accepted in to a block and accepted by the network. The fact that many of them sent no coins does not change the fact that that block has the highest number of individual transactions within it.

I will quote @theymos ask and @satoshi reply:



If there are no transactions, the network will die, but then Bitcoin will have a high value and then there will be transactions, or zero transactions and then no one will mine.

We'll worry about this after the last SAT is mined, which we probably won't get.

It will become an issue long before then.

The last sat will be mined around 2140. For 40 years before that, the block subsidy will be less than 1000 sats. For 40 years before that (which is 2060, so really not that far away and within the lifespan of many people currently using bitcoin), the block reward will be less than one thousandth of what it is now, at 0.00610351 BTC or less. This is nowhere near enough to support the current level of mining activity on its own. Indeed, in will only take 4 or 5 more halvings for the block subsidy to consistently be less than the amount of fees currently being collected in a block.

Fees will pay a very important part of mining rewards within the next 20 years. We certainly won't be waiting until 2140 for this to be an issue. A combination of more transactions in a block and higher bitcoin price in fiat, as well as times of higher fee rates in sats/vbyte, will need to be enough to sustain a sufficient level of mining activity to secure the network.

you are finally starting to see the light. about why trying to get people to stop using bitcoin has its drawbacks and why increasing the transaction count onchain has its advantages.

one thing i will knitpick from your lightbulb moment.. increasing the sats/vbyte  alone is bad enough. but put that along side the inevitable increased bitcoin price.. might help pools. but it damn sure wont help people wanting to transact.. after all it doesnt matter how much a fee is increased to if people have been steered away from making transactions due to offchain ramps and excess onchain fee.

no solution option should be to increase the sat/vbyte.
the only real solution is to increase the transaction count per block thus more people contribute collectively without it costing them their pension personally.

some people only get real world income of $2 a day in developing countries. some only get $40 a day. if you really think people will tolerate $2-$40 fee's+ you are much mistaken. would you use any visa,paypal,venmo, bank service that charges $2-$40+ per transaction, no you wouldnt(be honest) so why think it would even be a idea to think people would pay it in bitcoin.

increasing the fee/byte is just asking to steer people away from bitcoin. and deep down i think you know this.

It's not a solution, but it will still happen. Simple supply and demand has shown that the fee rate will increase to whatever people want to increase it to, not helped by centralized exchanges and other services paying far higher transaction fees than necessary, and poorly coded wallets and websites suggesting excessively high fees. These periods of higher fees will undoubtedly happen again in the future. Indeed, if we come to a point where it becomes unprofitable for some miners and they drop off the network, then until the next difficulty retarget blocks will be mined more slowly, block space will be at a premium, and fees will increase.

No, I would not pay fees of $2 per transaction, but I would pay fees of $2 to open a Lightning channel which allows me to make unlimited transactions at negligible additional cost. (I will not be responding to any attempts to derail this thread in to your personal vendetta against Lightning. Those posts can go here: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5380215.0)

no.. fee's do not endlessly increase.. people stop transacting as frequently at first.. and then just find another network to use instead, as you yourself have proven, you dont want to pay a bitcoin fee to transact for daily use, even at $2.. but you are willing to pay it one-off to then go use another network for months.. and the price has not even gone to $40.. yet you have already abandoned using bitcoin and moved to another network (the network you dont like me talking about.hmm)

thus proving you would happily abandon bitcoin due to fee's, as you have stated you already have, rather then you play your supposed "just pay more to support miners" theory
thus your theory has been debunked BY YOUR OWN ACTIONS

yes i know you dont want to scale transaction counts up to allow more transactions without scaling the individual users fee's..
yes i know you dont want more transactions so a cumulative total fee can cover costs, without hindering individuals costs
yes i know you instead want to scale individual fee's up to get people to exodus bitcoin for other networks.
i know, i know, no need for you to advertise it.

i know you think people will just pay more even though you have proven that 'just pay more' game theory does not work in reality. especially in your own use case of you moving to another network

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however i also know that YOU know, deep down there is a max people will pay before they give up using bitcoin. so why are you soo entranced on the theory that bitcoin doesnt need to scale transaction count and people will just pay more until they give up using bitcoin..
oh yea we cant talk about your love of other networks as the go to place everyone should use instead. hmmm

if fee's are high but not many people are transacting. its not a case of blocks go slower meaning blocks fill up
if there are in a few decades only say 100 transactions a block due to high fee's where everyone has moved to other networks(you already have). then even if blocks were 10x slower. all 1000transactions can still fit into 1 block.

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the solution is not to pressure fee's higher at the risk of losing peoples desire to use bitcoin.. to then pressure pools to pull out from mining because the fee's cant pay the bills..

that silly game is a way to kill bitcoin,
i know its your game.. because you love other networks. but thats not a way to keep bitcoin active and useful and secure.

your game
now
current tx average per block:1419
current fee average per transaction: $2
current mining rate: 190exa

then later
future wish tx average per block:1419
current fee average per transaction: $3
current mining rate: 170exa

then later
future wish tx average per block:709
current fee average per transaction: $6
current mining rate: 150exa

then later
future wish tx average per block:709
current fee average per transaction: $6
current mining rate: 130exa

and so on.
you want less hashpower, less people using bitcoin and bitcoin appearing alot more expensive to use than fiat wire transfers or other native banking systems. where your favourite altnet is the only game in town that appears better than fiat..

shame on you

I never said they did:


Not abandoning bitcoin at all, simply using its second layer solutions. And even then, I'm still supporting miners by making channel opening and closing transactions on the base layer. Even when most people are using Lightning, there will still be more than enough transactions happening on the base layer to fill the available block space and pay miners the fees they need.

Nice strawman. Once again, I will not be responding to any attempts to derail yet another thread in to your personal vendetta against Lightning.

imagining bitcoin was $1m/btc in 20 years   (1sat = $0.01)
the mining reward was: 0.1953125  ($195,312.50 reward)

lets look at the mining cost per block previously
2018 - 40exa - $35k
2020 - 100exa - $87k (2.5x)
2022 - 184exa - $160k (1.8x)

lets assume a low 2x cost for each 4 year period (for next 5 halving(20 years)),
yep i mean 2x every 4 years not every 2 years (lets keep costs low for example)
starting with 2022 at a 200exa range($174k cost)
2022 - $174k
2026 - $384k
2030 - $696k
2034 - $1.392m
2038 - $2.784m
2042 - $5.568m

this would mean out of the 5.568 COST only 195,312.50 is covered by the reward
$5372 is still needed by the fee's

even if we assume 1sat/byte even in a 4mb space ($2.50/tx in a 250byte lean tx)
thats only 4000000sat (0.04btc($40k)) fee total
so to cover the missing $5.332m of cost would require fee's of 134 sat/byte
meaning an average lean transaction of ~250bytes would be 33579 sat/tx ($335.79/tx)
sorry but no one is going to dare pay that. and blocks wont be willingly full of tx willing to pay that!!

the 'compromise' is either less secure mining per period(lower cost). or more transactions per block(increased combined fee total)

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so lets go with a average tx fee of $2.50 on a 250byte lean tx
using the $1m/btc that means each tx needs 250sat(1sat/byte)

but would require either the mining cost to be:
 0.04btc for total fee ($40k fee) + $195k reward - 4mb blocks ($235k mining cost(1.35x difficulty now))
 0.08btc total fee ($80k fee) + $195k reward -  8mb blocks ($275k mining cost(1.58x difficulty now))
 0.16btc total fee ($160k fee)  + $195k reward -  16mb blocks ($355k mining cost(2x difficulty now))
meaning in 20 years the hashrate can ONLY BE DOUBLE 'cost' compared to now but also needs blocks to be 16mb just to cover those costs
meaning. 20 years have passed but the mining cost difficulty has only doubled (not good security)

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or lets go with the scenario that people are willing to pay upto.. say $10 to transact
blocks would need to be:
 0.16btc for total fee ($160k fee) + $195k reward - 4mb blocks ($355k mining cost)
meaning in 20 years the hashrate can only BE double 'cost' as now but without increasing the 4mb limit, but people need to pay $10/tx
 0.32btc total fee ($320k fee) + $195k reward -  8mb blocks ($495k mining cost)
meaning in 20 years the hashrate can only BE triple 'cost' as now but with increasing to 8mb limit, and people need to pay $10/tx

again no one will want to pay more then $10 regularly before deciding that its not worth using bitcoin.
after all 'paypal', 'venmo' dont charge $10 a month just to then buy stuff with no internal fee
after all no bank/ western union charges $10 per wire transfer

so no one will feel that $10 is 'value' as a payment network cost of transfer or as a open session peg into a monthly session in another network

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so to summarise. if $10/tx is the max people will still think its kinda useful at-a-stretch to use bitcoin in 20 years. it would only allow a 2x of mining cost at current block space in 20 years. (also not very secure for a network after 20 years to only have got 2x more difficult)
or the blockspace will need to increase so that users dont end up paying more, to allow the security difficulty to further multiply by year 20 without costing users more than its appropriate

20 years is a hell of alot of time and we all know portable media 20 years ago was 1.4mb floppies and now its 1tb(1mill x factor)
20 years is a hell of alot of time and we all know internet speeds 20 years ago was 0.5mbs adsl and now its 50mbs(100 x factor)
heck even 10 years ago hard drives were 250gb and adsl was 5mbs.. now both stats are 10x.. yet the transaction count of bitcoin limit has not 10x scaled, because some people that dont want bitcoin to continue use 10/20 year old stats t say why it should not scale now nor for the next 20 years


so them thinking that 4x transaction count in 20 years is bad, is ignoring many things
so them thinking that 2x transaction count in 20 years is bad, is ignoring many things

we need to be in a position of 16mb blocks for a reasonable $2.50 fee/lean tx in 20 years but with only 2x mining cost compared to now
we need to be in a position of 8mb blocks for an at-a-stretch $10 fee/lean tx in 20 years but with only 3x mining cost compared to now

I understand that you’re asking this question to understand what it would be like in such a situation. But, such a question is an imaginary question and would never happen at all. There wouldn’t be any such time when there wouldn’t be transactions on the Bitcoin Blockchain. Every minute there are transactions being made on the Bitcoin Blockchain and sometimes the transactions even get heavier than the network can carry and that’s why you would see the fees increase sometimes. So, that’s to show you that such a thing can’t even happen at all, not now that Bitcoin network is a really huge one and there are over millions of people that are using it daily, and buying and selling going on every time.

Even right now there isn’t much adoption of the lightening network and I am believing that by the time there would be a good number of people who would consider this option, there would be much more like you have said who would be making use of the base layer for their transactions and miners would still be able to generate a lot of income from verifying all those transactions.

That’s not an issue that we should be worrying about  right now because it is not going to happen anytime soon, it would be taking a really long time before all the coins are mined up and we start talking about how miners can survive with just verification of transactions.