Bitcoin Forum

Since the block chain is maintained through the mining activity, how will be block chain be maintained after the mining is done?  I know that is a long time off, but eventually we will see the end of mining.  Will the wallet, exchanges and other services be able to carry the full structure of it?

In the year 2140?  After we are all dead?

Mining will continue, but instead of miners receiving the bulk of their income from the block subsidy (essentially paying them with inflation), they will receive their income from transaction fees.

Great question.

Every transaction has a small transaction fee.  Those fees add up and will be the incentive for miners to continue to secure the network.

Who ever ownes Bitcoin at that time will be fucking MINTED.

As Danny said fees, but we'll all be dead anyway so it doesnt matter.

I wondered this too, a lot actually. Like how are transactions supposed to confirm? Will people mine just for the sake of confirming transactions, not with the chance of receiving any block reward?

Read above. Miners will just get transaction fees.

People will still mine just for the transaction fees. it would be the best time to mine but would require a awesome piece of hardware.

This is the most frequently asked question

See what happened to 42coin: http://42coin.org/
42 coins max...
look what happened to price.... on cryptsy.com you can see its chart.

I do wonder if the transaction fees will be worth it to the miners or not too expensive for regular users though.

That will depend on factors that are difficult to predict today.

How popular will bitcoin become by then (How many transactions per day will be sent)?
Will the protocol rules for maximum block size be modified?  If so, how large will the maximum allowable blocksize be?
What will the electricity to bitcoin exchange rate be?
How high (or low) will the difficulty be?
How efficient will mining equipment be 125 years from now (hashes per kilowatt-hour)?

Thats a lot of varying factors to speculate on  :D. Shame we wont be around to see how it all pans out.

Fortunately the process is self regulating.

If there isn't enough profit for miners, then they will stop mining (either due to intelligent financial decision making, or because they can't afford to pay their electric bill any longer).  As there are less miners in the system, there are less miners to have to split the block reward (transaction fees) with in the pool.  This increases the total bitcoins earned by the remaining miners (who have access to efficient enough equipment, or cheap enough electricity to maintain profitability).

Where it could potentially run into a problem if the transaction fees per kilobyte are too small and the maximum blocksize is too small, is that there may not be enough miners remaining in the system to offer adequate protection from a 51% attack.

On the other hand, if bitcoin has extremely wide acceptance and usage, then very large businesses may find that it makes financial sense to contribute a small percentage of their revenue to mining at a slight loss to protect the payment system that they've adopted.

Would a 51% attack be catastrophic? What could they do if the gained that power?

They could reverse any transactions that they make (even after hundreds of confirmations), and any subsequent transactions that used any of those bitcoins they had sent.

They could pick and choose which transactions get confirmed, and which don't.

Wow i didnt know that. Is there much likelyhood this could actually happen?

Bitcoin would probably be fully mined a century and decades from now. I'm 100% the blocks halve. Really no use in worrying about it, since we all might be dead, and the miners share might be 1BTC.

The more miners, and the more pools, we have participating, the more expensive and difficult it is for an attacker to accumulate more hash power than the entire combined rest of the network.

Ah ok thanks for your help and answers  :).

Bitcoin will never be fully mined from my understanding, correct me if im wrong pls, and transaction fees will be used to encourage miners to mine. Though itll be very little amounts at current rates, hopefully the price increases or user numbers increase too.

No, it will end at some point and then transaction fees will go to whoever finds a "block".  As the above posters said. 

I think the idea is that it will be worth it because there will be a lot more BTC in use and hopefully more adoption of it so there would be a lot of fees.  As long as difficulty doesn't approach zero then you would think people would keep mining.

The last new satoshi (0.00000001 BTC) will be created in block 6,930,000.  The most recent block created (as of the posting of this message) is block 304,062.

Therefore, the last fraction of a bitcoin will be created in 6,625,938 blocks.

If the average rate of new blocks is approximately 10 minutes, this will take 66,259,380 more minutes.

That's:

1,104,323 more hours

or

46,013.5 more days

or

125.98 more years

We may switch to other alt-coins, or very simply just end up with a completely different society by that point.

As others have already said, the idea is that miners will still continue to mine in order to get transaction fees. This will be a gradual transition because the block reward is set to halve every four years until the last bitcoin is mined in 2140. During the first four years, each mined block was worth 50 bitcoins. Today, it's 25 and soon it will be 12.5, and so on. So between now and 2140, mining profits will gradually shift from being mostly mined bitcoins into being mostly from transaction fees. There is a little-known altcoin called Premine (PMC) which is a proof-of-concept that aims to show how a deflationary cryptocurrency like Bitcoin might look like and how its economy might function after the total supply of coins have been mined. Check it out if you're interested.

It seems that altcoin's block reward is still positive now.
I am not quite sure what you mean...

The world as we know it will end when bitcoin is fully mined. Not really, miners will just carry on for fees.

Miners will have a lot of time to adapt because, as early about 2030, the block reward will already be less than one bitcoin, and will keep being divided by 2 every 4 years.

Too far off to care. We will have something very close to quantum computing by then, unless circumstances force us otherwise. Technological progress has been rather tough to beat over time.

The technical side has been discussed, but what about the economical side?

Before bitcoin block reward halved from 50 btc, some expected bitcoin price to go up significantly in a short time; some expected a significant proportion of miners would quit mining; some expected tx fee to go up significant.

In the end, none of these predictions is correct. :)

A lot of people who should know better seem to think it's a good thing.

I'm not saying all cryptocurrencies are inherently bad. But Bitcoin in particular was designed with an agenda in mind, to further certain ideological goals that I consider to be toxic.

What happened to 42 coin was probably specific to 42 coin as it is an altcoin with little real value (like most alt coins).

To answer the OPs question: blocks will continue to be mined every 10 minutes and the miners will receive the TX fees only as their block reward.