Bitcoin Forum

Someday all Bitcoins will have been mined.

Is mining then still necessary ?

And is the 51% problem still in existance ?

Of cause!

Minging will never end and the last Bitcoin will never be mined!

Ah. Okay... ?? :)

What in case all coins have been premined, as it can be seen with some AltCoins ?

No new blocks mined = no transactions confirmed. Without mining the network dies.


Ofc there will be a time when the last bitcoin has been mined, from that day on only transactions fees will be the reward for mining.

Yes because mining will continue but I think it will be much more likely of a 51% attack due to many miners dropping out of the network.

The network will need hash power to verify transactions. Won't exactly be mining because there is no more bitcoin to dig, but not different in practice.

51% stuff is related to hash power controlled by a single organization, since many miners may drop in this stage, will be more serious than any time before.

Since this will be in more than 50 years, many events can happen to make Bitcoin secure even though there are no block rewards to incencitive miners.

Bitcoin could become widespread enough for mining to be sustainable with transaction feess, or perhaps in 40 years it will switch to PoS v.24 or something like this ;)

But if the majority will stop mining and miner hardware will get very cheap it should be extremely easy to get control over 51% mining power then ?

There are many other CryptoCurrencies that will finish coin generation soon.... How will they be able to work then if they are that vulnerable ?

All altcoins I know which have finished coin generation use PoS, so no mining is needed.

This is just not a real problem. And no mining doesnt go on forever, they will get paid to process transactions.

Is not needed means not possible anymore ?
Because if it´s possible a 51% attack would still be possible.

Actually no, it's impossible to mine a PoS coin.
Blocks are generated by coin-age consumption.

What I fear is a strategic attack by cartels with tons of hashing power.

What can be done about that?

I'm confused... why? I thought mining of bitcoins WILL end, it's just that miners will have to settle with the transaction fees they get from the blocks.

Yes.
Yes.
Yes.

Mining (Block finding) not only gives the miner block rewards and tx fees, but also puts unconfirmed tx into the blockchain to make it confirmed.

Some will keep mining for tx fees. Some will keep mining to keep bitcoin alive. Some will mine for fun. :)

That's the beauty of it. It effectively is a self-regulating ecosystem. If there's not enough incentive, people just drop off of mining. But some will continue nevertheless. It's not as if we need a minimum number of miners. Just a large enough number that a decentrilazation is effectively achieved.

And some will have made so much money through BTC, that they would leave a portion of their legacy to pay for mining.  :)

That's an interesting idea. A person with 1 million BTC (you know who you are) could perhaps run a script that submits a transaction with a 0.1 BTC fee every 10 minutes. It could subsidize miners for 190 years.

yes, this has happened in the alt coin world and has actually caused a few attacks on coins that converted to proof of stake,

with btc by that time the fees should be enough incentive (never mind advancements in technology) pretty fast.....

And if BTC value shoots up, even 0.01 BTC might be sufficient to enthuse miners. It could subsidize miners like for ever. :)

Some have died, some will die, and some are struggling. If the dev of a particular altcoin knows enough about programming and economic principles to find a method that will keep his/her coin's blockchain as secure as possible, then it will survive. If it does, then that solution will eventually propagate to other coins, and possibly Bitcoin.

The whole cryptocurrency scene is a huge technological, economic and social experiment. Anything important that we learn from Bitcoin and all the other altcoins are used to further evolve the Bitcoin protocol and all cryptocurrencies in general.

It should happen since no coins are added into the market any more. If there are BTC in addresses and the owner have forgotten the private key, it would most likely shoot up since the market volume is lower and the demand would be higher as bitcoin would have gain much much more recognition. But honestly, would any of us here be able to live that long till no bitcoins will be mined?

I think the only reason people will mine will be for financial reasons. Hopefully by this time the amount of TX fees will be enough so that miners will be able to cover all of their costs.

Most people wont live that long to see all this mined.

cex.io have said they arent intending of launching an attack.

Not only will it not go away, if mining becomes so unattractive that fewer people mine the 51% attack becomes even more probable.  See dogecoin for this type of death spiral.

pos coins have they own vulnerabilities and pos is generally much less secure then pow

Not that possible. People will be giving fees, when no bitcoins is mined, no bitcoin will be released to the market. The demands can be higher if there are more popularity among people, thus pushing the price up. People with low electrical fees and good ASICs can still ROI. It is possible for a ASIC to reach triple the efficiency than what it is now.

I would say none of us (alive now) would live to see that happen.  :P

I don't have any info on this, but I found the following thread (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327767.0) that mentioned Ghash.io did try to double-spend against a casino...

That was from a long time ago, they already clarified that it isn't them but a previous employee. However, the fact that they refused to take actions to lower their hashrates except to warn people is suspicious. I don't think by posting on Twitter or here would influence much people to move away from their pool.

I don't really understand why Cex doesn't allow its users to point their hashrate to other pools and thus easily lower the Ghash hashrate.
Ghash doesn't charge a pool fee AFAIK, so they should get no benefits from forcing Cex users to mine on Ghash...

They do charge maintenance fees, they deduct from your mined amount. They would also have to deduct your reject works. They have previously planned about this but they did not implement it at all. Also, I don't think it is possible since they do not assign individual hardwares to each user. They have included the option to redeem hardware but I see no reason in users doing that since they have to pay the electrical cost and to manage it themselves.

True, but they could still charge those maintenance, electricity and hosting fees for people mining elsewhere with the cex hashrate.


Hmmm I haven't considered this before, and that could be the actual reason.
If someone buy just 10 GH/s on cex, I am not sure how cex can deliver exactly 10GH/s to other pool, say Slush, for that user.

That's true, and I don't suggest anyone to use it at all, because of the high price.
I mention it just because we were discussing about the 51% attack and Ghash.io (Cex.io and Ghash.io are indeed the same company). :)

I don't think it would be possible to charge fees when they are mining at other pools. When mining at their pool, they can charge it directly from the mining profits, without much risk if the user refused to pay. I agree it is impossible, for it to be possible, you would need hundreds of 10GH devices and it would require a lot of effort for them to setup for each user.

I dont hink it will be a problen once all coins are mined.

Not really, people with a majority of network hashrate can still launch double spend attacks on casinos and exchanges, even when there is no block reward at all.

The key defence to problems of miner concentration is keeping the hashrate distributed among unrelated pools. People cite 40% or 30% as a threshold but really it should be lower. That is you need to ensure that n parties cannot collude to do this attack. For the case of n = 3, you get 100/6 or 16.7% as a threshold value. I suppose as the mining community matures even lower thresholds will be seen as prerequisite policy. Things also tend to settle down when hashrate isn't increasing like a mofo.

Whether tx fees will be enough remains to be seen but if enough commerce will ever support it, 30-100 years should be enough time to get there. It's only been 20 or so years since the Internet started to become widely used.

Yes, of course it exist, as long as there is POW, their is 51% attack, it doesn't matter if there is block reward or not.

Actually, it is easiest to 51% attack after all bitcoins have been mined due to the decrease in difficulty...

Difficulty may not decrease since no new coins are released to the trading market. There would be much more demands. Miners can still earn from transaction fees which is probably around $10-100. I don't think much people would stop mining since even advanced ASICs would have came out. If everyone stops mining, many would turn on their machine again to profit pushing the difficulty up.

Since this will be in so many years, I think it's safe to say that the developpers will find a way to adapt so 51% attacks are not a concern.

A new algorithm perhaps?

A new algorithm may be incompatible for ASICs. It isn't easy for developers to just make a fork and make all the users and miners to switch to a new client. It doesn't benefit those with big ASIC farms since all their hardware would be wasted.

And that is really bad? If the new algorithm is incompatible with asics, maybe many of the users (who are far from mining because of the dificulty and costs) will start to mine themselves for the stability and safety of the network...

Perhaps a PoW-like system would be made, which makes 51% attacks impossible, and would still be compatible with ASICs. It's so far in the future that there's no way to know what kind of developpment will happen :D

There isn't a person alive today that will be alive the day the last Bitcoin is mined.

Last bitcoin won't be mined til 2140 so unless your thinking medical technology is going to extend lifespan's pretty significantly in the next 120 some odd years or so I don't think anybody on these forums will ever witness the last coin being mined.

Really the best way to keep from the 51% is to not mine at pools above 40%.  That way it keeps the protocol decentralized.

It is not easy to implement such change as it will be a hard fork.
The core devs will need to get a certain degree of consensus from bitcoin users, merchants and miners.

Yes. For people who invested a lot of money into mining, they don't have any chances of getting ROI. If the new algorithm can be CPU mined effectively, botnet mining would resurface. Botnet mining are most probably stopped now since the difficulty is so high.

Understood, guess there's much into it

Thanks ranochigo and Peter882 for the info!

I'm guessing they are still quite present, since they cost nothing for the operator. And they are most likely very profitable with X11 or X13 or whatever.