Bitcoin Forum

Recently, Bitcoin number 19,000,000 was mined and it's a huge milestone for Bitcoin.
Only 2M BTC are left until all 21,000,000 BTC will be mined, which will happen in 2140.

Even the next 1,000,000 BTC will only take 4 more years to be mined as calculated here:


So, for the last 1,000,000 BTC, it will take almost 120 years to be mined.

---

For the last Bitcoin, it's even more impressive:

The last Bitcoin will need more than 34 years to be mined. Yes, a single BTC will take 34 years to be mined!
It will start around 2106 and take until 2140 until the last BTC is mined.
That's a timespan larger than Bitcoin has existed so far. It's twice as long (Bitcoin has existed for 14 years now).
The last Bitcoin will take the same time than the first approx. 20,960,000 Bitcoins to be mined.

Here's a visualisation:

https://i.imgur.com/8RGM0g6.png

Of course, Miners will be rewarded by transaction fees by then.

But it's impressive to see how mining rewards will decrease.  :)

Those are quite impressive numbers, and many of us (actually all of us) can only imagine how Bitcoin would exist then and how people would interact with it, as we would not be there to witness it.

How much impact would mining rewards and halving have on the market then, when about 99% have already been mined and the remaining yet to be mined would not affect the market much.

This is also a topic with many uncertainties about how motivated miners would be at that time to invest in mining rigs and electricity.

Interesting question and in my opinion, it's very difficult to predict.
But I would expect that the Block rewards will only make up a very small percentage of miner rewards and therefore, halvings would only have symbolic status.


Currently, transaction fees are 1 to 2 percent of the current mining revenue:

https://i.imgur.com/Z2INv8t.png
https://stats.buybitcoinworldwide.com/fees-percent-of-reward/

Way after 2050, I expect the opposite like 1-2% block rewards and 98% transaction fees, going more extreme until 2140. But we have lightning of course, leading to uncertainties in my prediction.
The important part of mainly transaction fees as miner rewards would be that these fees (BTC) are already in circulation in opposite to block rewards, which are newly issued.

there wont be 21mill. as the topic creators images show only 20,999,999.9769

making the date from the 20,999,998 to 20,999,999 being the 'last whole bitcoin'
dates of after 2096-before2104 (under 8 years to make a final whole bitcoin)

so we only have 74 years not 117 years until the last WHOLE bitcoin
..
we also have the average TX fee combined per block of 0.07btc (10btc/144 blocks(a day)) (https://www.blockchain.com/charts/transaction-fees)
by which if fee's remain at this same level. then the reward will be equal in about 2045 (23 years time)


in the next 23-76 years, fee's will be the significant income.
so before 2045 we should not be trying now to make bitcoin more expensive to "compensate miners" due to their reward decreases now.. instead we should be making bitcoin cheap fee for people to use bitcoin more. and enjoy bitcoin more to gain more adoption of THE BITCOIN NETWORK(not side projects/networks pretending to be bitcoin but dont involve mining)

NOW we should be increasing the amount of transaction capacity on THE BITCOIN NETWORK(not on side networks that have no mining)

so that more can use and enjoy bitcoin now, and so that the fee's can be spread even further across more users, thus keeping fee's reasonable individually,. so that as things grow later. the fee's stay low individually but amass collectively per block to afford miners a good bonus/income from

..
alot of people think we have 117 years to worry about miners getting paid via fees... wrong
alot of people think we have 23 years before even worrying, deciding about miners fee's. wrong
some idiots think we need to ruin bitcoins utility by making it expensive now, to compensate miners now.. wrong
we need to grow utility now, to then create the buffer and the potential for the future to not suddenly hit us

Well no, I didn't know about the latest Bitcoin to be mined, and I appreciate this kind of threads to acquire more knowledge about the nature of Bitcoin little by little.

We can never be 100% sure if the Bitcoin will exist then, or if it will have been replaced by some other digital coin, or if the world will have disappeared by then, due to a nuclear cataclysm or something similar, but everything indicates that if things continue as they are now, with governments with an unstoppably increasing spending trend, with fiat currencies increasingly devalued and with the Bitcoin being more and more acquired and used by the population, by the time the last Bitcoin is mined, whoever has a fraction of Bitcoin will be rich.

It is a question of supply and demand, scarcity and production.

No more merits or I'd shove them around, but yes, technically, franky's right. The final coin will actually never be mined, so it's the penultimate coin that's more predictable.

Not sure I can ever contribute useful thoughts to how the Bitcoin economy can remain interesting for miners at that stage but I do agree that utility is probably a huge part of any future solution. It's a likelihood we'll get to see some significant upgrade or change to Bitcoin's algorithm in our life time (or my life time anyway), but we'd definitely need to continue the trend of increasing utility to motivate that.

If miners are 99% depending on transaction fee and 1% depending on mining reward, that means miners are depending on transaction fee already. At start, miniers got 50BTC for mining a block, which increases bitcoin supply in circulation. Increase supply will have reduction price effect on price. After every halving, the mining reward is reducing every 210000 blocks. The reducing mining reward will result to increasing bitcoin price because if the supply is not reduced, the price couldn't be as high as it is. Because of this, people fomo during halving as the supplying is getting reduced and buy during the time. Probably this may become a fomo event in the future as it is happening now, people may take halving as a period of buying. If the supply is reduced, with more adoption and fiat devaluation, definitely there would be more increase in bitcoin price.

I can not doubt this at all, fiat will always depreciate, an advantage for higher bitcoin price. Taking gold as an example, gold reached $678 in 1980, gold reached all-time-high ($2075) in 2020. According to officialdata.org, the buying power of gold at $678 in 1980 has the same buying power of $2142 in 2020. Although people are buying gold but yet getting supplied by gold miners, the valuation in gold is more in fiat valuation. The amount of chocolate gold can purchase in 1980 is still almost the same amount the same amount of gold would purchase in 2022, but getting value in fiat depreciation. This also would help in bitcoin price valuation, definitely.

Do you mean why the miners should still validate transactions at that point? Well, the fees they'll earn should be more than enough as incentive since bitcoin will be extremely rare, and people will be talking about satoshis by that time because the value, probably, will be extremely high.

People tend to be surprised by this, but it isn't as fantastic as it sounds.  I'm reminded of the saying that if you travel halfway to your destination each day, you will never arrive there.  That's sort of how Bitcoin block rewards are issued.  They keep getting cut in half, which makes it sound a little "fantastic" when you look at only the final date.  The last few reward cycles are pretty small though.  Likely tx fees would make up a lion's share of the block reward at that point and the reward itself would be a secondary thought as it reduces itself to near nothing. (Maybe, I guess we'll see what the price does.  Well, I won't but maybe someone else will live that long.)

Mining rewards have little to no impact on the market now, let alone then, it's often thought that selling pressure from miners brings the price down or the opposite, but IMO that is far from correct, the mining rewards are just a fraction of the trading volume, the supply from "elsewhere" is A LOT greater than what miners get as mining rewards, and as more and more coins leave the hands of miners to non-miners, this little impact miners have over the market slowly diminishes until it becomes completely irrelevant.


As long as there is any sort of profit to be made "big or small" some miners will still run their gears, in fact, even if running mining gear results in a loss, many people will still mine just to keep the blockchain alive (self-interest for them to be able to send and receive bitcoin), but the bigger issue would be the blockchain's security.

if the incentives to run a mining gear don't exist -- the network becomes more prone to attacks, so bitcoin's security as it stands right now is closely related to its value, the more expensive it gets the more secured it becomes, hopefully, that will change one day when the majority of people start using and protecting bitcoin rather than just mining it for profit.

That's exactly what I was talking about in my reply.
If there is not enough inventive to mine Bitcoins, then it creates a security risk as more people could be less motivated to switch on their rigs, resulting in less hashrate and security.

The alternative is Bitcoin rises to make tx fees more expensive, enough to motivate people to actually invest in mining, but this eojmg affect the general users as transacting would be more expensive and holders would be demotivated to actually send bitcoins.

Many things will surely change when the last bitcoin will be mined. Bitcoin network may not remain the same:
1. Some miners will loose interest in the bitcoin network which may also mean that bitcoin network may be weak
2. Transaction fees will be high which may push people to other layers of transaction as LN.
3. The government accusations of Bitcoin energy consumption will become very meaningless.
4. Bitcoin will become less volitile because demand and supply will become somewhat stable.
5. The price of bitcoin will be high and will remain high there.
6. There will be bitcoin hardfork because some developers will propose to create more bitcoins and some will disagree. Which will result to something like Bitcoin SV

As more bitcoins are been mined yearly, and the amount of bitcoin been mined is reduced by half after every four years. Now bitcoin hasn’t spent half of the total year needed for the complete bitcoin to be mined, and almost all the bitcoin as already been mined. People are joining into mining everyday, I just can’t imagine how competitive it will be mining the last bitcoin and how it will have effect on the market. Many of us if not all won’t witness the last bitcoin mined.

Wow, I'm sure it's the sort of info one could come up with, using school-level Math calculations, but I had no idea the last Bitcoin would be mined for 34 years! I knew, of course, of halving, but I didn't know that one coin would take this long. Then again, a few people pointed out that the last Bitcoin will never be mined, and that thus much less time is needed to finish mining than anticipated, which is also something I didn't know. Investopedia (https://www.investopedia.com/tech/what-happens-bitcoin-after-21-million-mined/) says the number of BTC "will likely never reach 21 million". Does it mean that it's unclear and different opinions can be equally grounded regarding this question?

For the 20,999,999.9769 number: the explanation of the missing sats are technical reasons like rounding down issued sats per block at some point, here's a very good article describing it: https://blog.amberdata.io/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-never-reach-21-million

https://blog.amberdata.io/why-the-bitcoin-supply-will-never-reach-21-million

In addition, there have been various trivial incidents from individual miners meanwhile, that the total number of Bitcoin will be even lower. That part ist also explained in the article.
It's also possible that more of such incidents could follow.

its not mined coins being sold that have created the mathematical dlimna that btc finds itself in today.

Its ledgers selling btc that have never been mined and do not exist as utxos that is the conundrum Somebody or the sum of bodies broke bitcoin. there are more than 21 million being sold and they aint on the btc network

the lazy answer to who is selling so much off network inifite supply btc would be the same answer to the question

what shady exchange became massive trading an sql ledger of infinite btc?

and the grand finale to this mysterious supply of infinite btc

ETH is better than btc because exchange is handled on ledger via dex

but eth is still not the best


Fixed supply on ledger exchange layer 1 is the pinnacle of our encrypted trustless and secure economic system.

Bitcoin is dead

long live the fixed supply encrypted distributed ledger with high speed on chain exchange

Pretend that we are in 2026, 20 million BTC's have been mined. 1 million bitcoins are out there somewhere. The time that the last 1 million bitcoins would be mined is 114 years from now. (118 years in the present.) I can predict that 20.5 million bitcoins would be mined by 2030. Now, you will see something change. 2022-2026 is a 4 year gap, which means that it would take at least 4 years to mine the 20th millionth bitcoin, or it would take 4 years to mine 1 million bitcoin. That would be in 2026. In 2024, bitcoin's mining reward would decrease for the 5th time. After 2026, there would be another halving 2 years later. The next 4 year gap is 2026-2030. The time would take to mine bitcoin in the 2026-2030 4 year gap is 500,000 BTC. Why? Because every 4 years, Bitcoin mining rewards would be halved. In 2028, there would be another bitcoin mining reward decrease for the 6th time. By 2030, Bitcoin's circulating supply is projected to be 20.5 million bitcoin. Then 2 years later, there would be another mining reward decrease. The year would be 2032. In 2036, my projection of bitcoin's circulating supply would be around 20.75 million bitcoin. That would be at least like 250,000 BTC mined in 4 years. After this, it would keep repeating all the way until 2108-2140, where the world turned their attention to the last bitcoin to be mined.







Deleted my previous post since not enough information.

We are entering a very interesting phase of our Bitcoin experiment, where we will soon see if "Miners fees" will be sufficicient for miners to continue mining. We all know that the Lightning Network is way better for people to use, because the fees are much lower and the transactions are much faster.

Now, what will happen if the Lightning Network adoption increase so much, that we hardly get any transactions on-chain? Will the few transactions being done on-chain be enough to reward miners? (We hope that the price will go up, so that the few Satoshi's are worth the hashing power used to get it)  ::)

Miners don't really care about the scarcity of the supply in the next year to come rather they only concentrated to mine bitcoins these days no matter how much they can get. assuming they are getting some profit from today's mining, this news won't scare them or worry them about the bitcoin unmined supplies because there getting some profit from transactions too which is another source of profit for miners. They already planned their next move and as long as they know they're getting something, we won't see any changes.

I was just thinking about the time when all BTC will be mined. I know we all won't live at that time but I'm wondering... If the fees should cover the cost of mining, won't they be too high? I'm not sure how many transactions fit in one block, but if today a block reward (6.25 BTC) is around $270.000 in fiat, won't fees cost too much once all BTC is mined? I mean, that means fees of all transactions in one block should cost around $270.000.

Sorry if what I wrote is bunch of nonsense. I'm just trying to figure it out...

Can you please stop shitposting in my topic?  ???

---

Exactly, it's like OGNasty said:

I think the idea of travelling is a great way to get an understanding how the halvings works in regards of Block reward issuance.  :)

---

It's still a long time, even if we would say it could be critical 25 years from now, when Block rewards will start to get very low compared to now. But we had already phases, where fees made up 20-25% of block rewards. Yes, maybe on-chain fees will be a bit higher than today and for very cheap fees, lightning will be used. It's possible.

I expect, it'll be a constant process, where Bitcoin gets more valuable but even on-chain fees won't explode.
Remember SegWit, where Bitcoin's TPS was increased and more TX were fitted into a block without downside. TX costs and network congestion went down because of SegWit.
Maybe we will see some more similar updates to improve Bitcoin and maintain the affordability of on-chain transactions.

Too high for buying cup of coffee? Maybe. But you need to think also how worthless everything will be in 2140 in fiat money. 120 years of more endless inflation IF the fiat even survives that long.

But to answer your question: Smaller purchases will be made in Layer 2 tech like Lightning network and those payments will be "saved" in the Layer 1 blockchain only at the end of a day or a week. So it is not a problem.

 Yeah, like the other would say: Bitcoin is dead, long live Bitcoin !





 Wow, 19M already !  Do the reward shouldn't be smaller ?  !!!!

high fee's means people wont want to use bitcoin to even enter LN. they will instead exchange their fiat for a cheaper altcoin like litecoin. and then use that to enter LN to then play with millisats.

same with exiting. those that did lock up btc to enter LN prior. wont wont to exit LN back to BTC. instead they will 'atomic swap' to an altcoin like litecoin and then use litecoin to exchange to fiat.
.. think about that

yep LN is not a bitcoin layer.. LN is a branch/bridge between many coins.. it is its-own network that does things differently than bitcoin.
bitcoin logo is orange(like the fruit) but LN is not the orange zesty skin that only fits around the orange fruit. .. LN is a hybrid tree branch that connects between many fruit. without being the fruit itself.. its a branch, not a layer

bitcoin had to be manipulated to fit LN


if paypal started charging $1-3 for every deposit/withdrawal/payment or charged a monthly membership fee to use paypal+, would you still use paypal. or would you move over to something like venmo..

its the age-old game of the gold system. lock up gold in bank vaults and play with paper money. then not see the benefit of exchange paper money for gold. and instead swap papermoney for nickel and copper coins..

...
segwit increased TPS... WHEN?
moving upto 2017 bitcoin had the capacity of upto 4200 tx, and was in reality moving upto ~2500 average.. then segwit came in. and.............. 5 years later.. hmm.. flatline
https://api.blockchain.info/charts/preview/n-transactions-per-block.png?timespan=all&h=405&w=720
see the exponential curve going up to 2017(presegwit). see the peak.. and then .... sideways and downwards


please try not to read into the cultish propaganda narrative of how certain people say LN is "the solution".. its an altnet..
its not a bitcoin solution. its a bitcoin(network/ecosystem) exit.
a solution to using the bitcoin network is not to make people stop using the bitcoin network

 pure and simple. it doesnt even have a blockchain or network wide audit or any of the benefits and security of bitcoin
.. its not bitcoin(network), even its unit of measure(millisats) are not understood by the bitcoin network

 devs pretended to make bitcoin(the actual network) better when all they actually done was stifle bitcoin to try getting people to move over to another network. yep they want bitcoin fee's to be high, yep they want limited transaction capacity on-chain. yep they dont want the 2 billion 'unbanked' population to use bitcoin AT-ALL

 all so they can sell people into the old gold era game of: 'lock up the asset and let people play with unsettled(unconfirmed) value in silly promissory notes(contracts) that wont settle because its too costly to actually settle them.
..think about that
(not with your altnet favouritism hat on, but with a critical thinking of a bitcoiner hat)

Yeah, I remember how SegWit dropped the transaction prices and I guess something similar will have to be created so that more transactions fits into one block. Then maybe the block reward payed only by a transaction fee will be enough.


I didn't think that fiat will be worth anything in 120 years. I just made an example how would that look today in fiat value. But I guess one of the solutions is layer2 for small transactions. I'd write "we will see" but I guess we won't. Maybe our kids will see ;D

1. they didnt drop the fee..
they instead made old transaction formats 4X more expensive. here its in the code. its a 4X increase of legacy
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/consensus/consensus.h#L21
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/623745ca74cf3f54b474dac106f5802b7929503f/src/consensus/validation.h#L143
see it says *4

imagine paypal had a 20cent fee per payment. and promised a 4x fee discount if people use paypal+.. then you find out what they actually done was make regular paypal initially 80cents to say that paypal+ is 4x cheaper (20cents).. and then weeks later they removed the fee formula that made prices 20cents and made it so paypal+ was $1-$3 average. meaning regular paypal(legacy) was $4-$16



also fee's in 2009-17 were sub 1cent-10cents.. fee's are now $1-$3
https://api.blockchain.info/charts/preview/fees-usd-per-transaction.png?timespan=all&h=405&w=720
note the flatline upto 2017.. and then the large ups and downs after segwit

Hm... Didn't see it like that. But one of the benefits of SegWit was to make it possible to fit more transactions into one block. Shouldn't that cause transaction fees to be lower? Maybe now there's simply more transactions that before and that's the reason for the transaction fee increase you are mentioning.

There is yet the very first solution of increasing the blocks size !  The block size was limited at first time because of technical and networking difficulties (largely surpassed now), and the increasing was always part of the Bitcoin conception. It is what was implemented for Bitcoin-Cash, then majority of miners refused the migration so it is what have land to the fork from which BCH resulted.
 Miners then just won't abandon the income constituted from the tx fees !!

While I appreciate your dedicated time to reply here, I need to say that things are a bit more complex than outlined in your post. We just don't know yet how fees will work out and people have already said in the past (around 2017/2018) that Bitcoin will be impossible to use because of high fees.
Well...
What happened?
Nothing like that. Fees are cheaper than ever most of the last 5 years.

---

The number of transactions that have happened is not a proof that the capacity didn't increase.
In fact, SegWit reduced network congestion and that's also a reason why we still have low fees of 0.10 cent today. There *could* be more transactions while tx fees will remain low due to SegWit / Lightning.

---

What?  :D
Legacy transactions didn't become 4x more expensive because SegWit was introduced?
Legacy transactions are just more expensive compared to SegWit transactions because SegWit transactions are cheaper because SegWit transaction have less block weight than legacy transactions.

Spinning this around that legacy transactions are now 4x more expensive does not make any sense...
In general, even legacy Transactions are benefiting from SegWit because it's much more unlikely to have a congested network.

---

You can still get transactions of around 0.10$, I don't see a problem...  ???
Even by using a legacy address, you can get close to 0.10$ fees...

---

---

Exactly, SegWit reduces network congestion because more tx can be fitted into one block. Less network congestion = periods of high fees are less likely

there are not more transactions though

the promises of the devs adding segwit were false promises trying to get people not to grow bitcoin but to be lulled into activating a new TX feature, which sole purpose was to make locking up transactions possible so people can then be off-ramped to other networks under the new regime of telling people that bittcoin should not be used more often but less often and people should stop using bitcoin and instead shift value over to other networks


THERE ARE NOT MORE TRANSACTIONS.. FEES ARE NOT CHEAPER

please step away from listening to the propaganda idiots that fame up segwit and their altnet solutions they want people to move over to. and instead look at the actual numbers of actual charts. actual code

i showed you both the charts of fees and transactions per block.. and both are not what you think.. both actually show that fees are higher and that transactions have stopped growing and stagnated at about ~2,500tx per lock

..
read the code,
~
it does not say that serialised(legacy) / 4= stripped(segwit) fee value
it instead says stripped * 4 = serialised weight(legacy)

please read the code read the charts heck even read the hard data on your bitcoin node independently if you dont trust the charts. it will show you what you need to know.
anyway. read the charts and the code. and stop reading the fangirl twitter propagandists adverts of how they pretend they are doing things..
hard data and code does not lie. but social media of people that want others to off-ramp away freom bitcoin will lie. they want you to hate bitcoin, they want to promote their other networks as solutions to problems.. problems they put in place and pretended are technically impossible to fix. yet are technically possible to fix, just politically prevented from choosing to fix

..
as for you saying you can still get transactions for 10cents.
well yes if you are going to compare the transactions that take 12-24hours to confirm.. but using that .. compare that to the fee of transactions 7 years ago that also took the 12-24 hours to confirm. and you will see that the fee's are still more expensive now

dont play game comparing a 24 hour wait fee(today) with a 10minute wait fee(x years ago)
compare the 10min wait fee of now and in the past...

separately
compare the the 24hour wait fee of now and in the past.

EG
fee for 10min wait is ~$1.50 now, and was $0.15 in 2015
fee for 12hour wait is ~$0.15 now, and was $0.0015 in 2015
..
yep in 2015 people were saying that fees were increasing when 'sub penny' prices started becoming 10cents or more.. these days those say timings are more like $1+