Bitcoin Forum

I heard that miners confirm transactions.  If so, how does a proof-of-stake coin confirm if there are no miners?  Also, when a coin will hit it's hard cap (21 MIL for BTC), if everyone stopped mining at that time, will the coin die?

Thanks,
Flip

Miners will keep mining for transaction fees after all of the 21m coins have been mined.

ah ok.. that clears it up a little...

what about proof of stake coins?

The transaction fee is processed by and received by the bitcoin miner. When a new bitcoin block is generated with a successful hash, the information for all of the transactions is included with the block and all transaction fees are collected by that user creating the block, who is free to assign those fees to himself. See this site : http://bitcoinfees.com/ (http://bitcoinfees.com/) , explained nicely.

With Proof of Work, the probability of mining a block depends on the work done by the miner (e.g. CPU/GPU cycles spent checking hashes). With Proof of Stake, the resource that's compared is the amount of Bitcoin a miner holds - someone holding 1% of the Bitcoin can mine 1% of the "Proof of Stake blocks".

Some argue that methods based on Proof of Work alone might lead to a low network security in a cryptocurrency with block incentives that decline over time (like bitcoin) due to Tragedy of the Commons (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_Commons), and Proof of Stake is one way of changing the miner's incentives in favor of higher network security.

Kindly,
       MZ

There are no miners = there are no confirmations, and nothing will prevent double spends andd other attacks, wether if it happens because internet is shut down, or because no one wants to mine the coin.

And after all the coins are mined, there still will be the transaction fees as reward, and the desire of people to keep bitcoin alive.

Stay away from POS coins. They are much more vulnerable to an attack against the blockchain and generally will hold much less value then bitcoin.

Ok!  Thank's everybody, it really helped a ton.