Bitcoin Forum

What would happen if no new bitcoins are created ?
Would the ecosystem sustain itself or would we see miners leave for greener/newer pastures.
My prediction is that since bitcoin creation is slowed incrementally the last of the bitcoins wouldn't matter so much since the market would not be accustomed to constant infusion of money.

Nothing.

Maybe price will go up and maybe will fall down. This is something that cant be predicted also it cant be predicted price for cryptos.
Seem like that it will take some time to pass before some changes accouter off course that mean that lot of companies get involved in cryptos

If there is something more profitable in the cryptoworld companies would just move there.
Currently large part of the bitcoin pushing crowd is early adoptors that ended up with vast amounts of money and obviously want to protect their investement by recycling some of it to new ventures. The quality of the ventures will eventually determine if this thing is sustainable.

I'd wait for the next difficulty adjustment, which would make mining FAR easier, then fire up my CPU miner and become a millionaire over night.

Unfortunately for me, your scenario is exactly as absurd as saying, "what would happen if all the banks decided to leave the vaults unlocked & open, and turned the cameras off?"

Miners are being rewarded (paid) to secure the network. It's profitable because it benefits Bitcoin.

I believe you misunderstood. I mean bitcoin mining finished , 21 millions are created. Only transaction fees for miners.

Ohhhhhh, you're hypothesizing about distant future scenarios and for some reason using the word "tomorrow".

Still just as absurd. But to answer your question, imagine what would happen to the price of gold if tomorrow they announced the very last ounce of gold had been mined, and there was no more left to be found in the entire universe.

Think back to economics 101 when you learned about supply and demand. What happens when demand remains the same, but supply drops to zero?

I believe it's really hard to predict what may happen if bitcoin mining stopped after it reached 21 million. The only way of knowing exactly what would happen is for it to happen and take it from there. Prices could drop to a big time low or they could rise pretty high it's something nobody is sure of.

Probably a (temporary?) spike in the price
remember much of the present downard price pressure is due to miners switching 70-90% of new btc's into fiat to pay bills

I BTC mining stops, there will be just exchanges and the value will either rise or fall. :P

when your scenario comes true, accumulated transaction fee may exceed the current mining reward per block. The miners are still rewarded and keep mining to secure the network.

Yes the other currencies are one queue.The future is uncertain there are many other cryptos using the same algorithm as bitcoin

Using the same equations does not equate to uncertainty. Rather, it strengthens the blockchain technology.

You need to read this: http://trilema.com/2014/the-woes-of-altcoin-or-why-there-is-no-such-thing-as-cryptocurrencies/

There can only be one, and Bitcoin is it.

P.S.
http://trilema.com/2013/things-that-matter-these-days-things-that-dont-matter-these-days is a related and also very excellent read

First come first served is what I like to call it.

Well miners would still take their money from fees, but the point is mute seeing as the creation of bitcoin isnt going to stop tomorrow or anytime soon.

Probably nothing hard. System will still survive. But I worry about transaction times..

If you all did that... I would become the mining king with my Commodore 64. Greed is what keeps this from happening.

Without a block reward, transaction fees determine the security of the network. In order for Bitcoin to survive, total transaction fees will have to be much higher, whether by paying a higher fee per transaction or by increasing the number of transactions (or both). This will happen soon. We are already reaching the point where free transactions are not getting confirmed.

If bitcoins stop coming then there won't be any drastic/major effect on rates and market. However if miners are all removed then it will pose lot of problems in transactions confirmation. BTC will have to require additional systems of its own for verification.

If your at all curious what happens to a currency when it has been completely mined, I recall a few months ago someone in the community making a coin called "preminecoin"

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=427519.0

This coin when released was entirely mined out, I am not sure how the coins were distributed to users but the only way to earn PMC right now is collecting the TX fees you get when users send the coins around.

That was my first thought, however since bitcoin is one of now thousands cryptos and services could just hop to better return on investment value whereas gold can only be made in the heart of supernovas. Again this is not an argument for gold, this is playn hypothesis on the condition of the bitcoin ecosystem, whether is is selfsustaining or not.

I really like these experiements.

Can you fill me up on what happened to PMC ? I checked the thread which is huge and understood that it was replaced by something else.

The difficulty of the network would still be the same. Any miner that you have would still produce the same amount of bitcoin regardless if other miners are mining or not until the difficulty resets.

As tool for transferring value it is fiiting that most business in btc isfinancial based.
However I would like to see more productive capacity being funded with btc.

Miners revenue would be fees only. That wouldn't be enough to pay the electricity bills at the current hash rate. Either the fees would increase, or the hash rate would drop, or both.

Either effect could destroy Bitcoin, in my view. Lower hash rate reduces the coin's security; if it gets too low, the coin can't be trusted. High fees discourage users; if they get to high, users will switch to PoS coins or even back to credit cards.

If mining stopped "tomorrow", it would be an existential crisis for Bitcoin. However, it won't. Mining is set to gradually decrease over decades. If the value of Bitcoin doubles, on average, every 4 years, then that will offset the block reward halving.

My guess is that we have an S-shaped growth with an overshoot for hash rate. Miners will leave as we reach the peak of the overshoot, but at some point it will still be profitable to mine due to fees.

Miners fees make up .3% of the money miners make, meaning that if the fees raised by 100x then miners would still only make a third of what they make now. Which in fantasy land means that miners just gracefully exit and cease to exist, but really means you now have a drop of hash rate and also a group of people with machines that make hashrate that got fucked over by bitcoin and have no wish for it to succeed.

You fail to understand the fact that the overall transaction volume is low now. When TX volume increases the overall amount of TX fees will also increase. Also when transaction volume increases the price of bitcoin is likely to increase as more commerce will generally mean higher demand for bitcoin.

There is a long time before the block subsidy will go away completely so bitcoin has a long time to see it's transaction volume increase enough to make TX fees enough to support the miners.

Another point is that miners will likely see increases in efficiency over time, so when the block subsidy is reduced it will have little effect on the ongoing profitability of the miners as they will be able to use this added efficiency to have lower electric costs. 

So miners and future miners would most likely survive with just the fees.

All the others are irrelevant, in the end there can only be one. And Bitcoin is it (http://trilema.com/2014/the-woes-of-altcoin-or-why-there-is-no-such-thing-as-cryptocurrencies/).

Sorry, all you altcoin supporters, but it's true. None of the others matter one lick, and in the not-too-distant future, none of the current altcoins will even exist, as far as the world is concerned.

I don't see why there should be only one, competition is good even for the leading competitor.

"So for the benefit of all the derps derping about “cryptocurrencies” : there is no such thing. There’s Bitcoin and that’s it, because there can only be one. All the rest of the crap exists only inasmuch as a) it stays theoretical or b) it stays small enough nobody cares. Where a) and b) are only distinct in the derp point of view, otherwise they’re the same thing. But good luck with all the community-of-retards (http://trilema.com/2014/why-dogecoin-is-a-scam-why-the-people-pushing-it-are-assholes-why-business-insider-is-a-contemptible-piece-of-shit-why-anyone-who-ever-worked-for-it-will-be-dancing-in-the-street-for-nickels-and-wh/) driven, super-duper-innovative, ultra-mega-creative, asic-resistant, future-of-revolution-and-everything altcoins."
-Mircea Popescu

http://trilema.com/2014/the-woes-of-altcoin-or-why-there-is-no-such-thing-as-cryptocurrencies/

This man, Mircea Popescu, is ostensibly more intelligent than me. Which means, dear reader, he is ipso facto almost certainly far more intelligent than you. You should therefore heed his wisdom with great care.

Tickling my ego there, but the argument from authority is not valid. Why there should be only one ?
Or to put it more mathematically : does a path of action moves exist that would destroy bitcoin.
My non intelligent answer is yes. Bitcoin protocol is the law but its power rests on the people using it and people can take wrong actions.
If there is no such path that would destroy bitcoin why is so many people here worried about it ? Why even the inventor was worried about it ?
There CAN BE ONLY ONE. Is this some kind of Highlander fantasy ?

I agree. All altcoins do not provide any additional value above what bitcoin can provide. They are all much less secure and vulnerable then bitcoin and are vulnerable to attacks that bitcoin is not subject to. Even if you were to use an altcoin as a way to do commerce you would be taking on great risks.  

farm miner closed.
free miner (like me ?) win.

bitcoin is a network with more than industrial miner inside.
like the stable backup bitcoin and the 10min (or real time) confirmation of a transactions.

If bitcoin mining stops tomorrow, miners will not likely support it anymore, so the blockchain will be susceptible, and then maybe price will go down.

The point remains, though. To retain the status quo, the product of transaction volume, fee per transaction, and value of BTC, needs to increase 300-fold. That's a big increase to be depending on.

That would decrease security, though. Efficiency benefits miners and attackers equally, so if miners take advantage of it to reduce their costs, attackers can mount a given attack more cheaply.

Certainly all the Proof-of-Work altcoins have the same problem. The "work" part costs money, and that ultimately must come from either high inflation or high fees. (That is, either savers or spenders.)

In the long run, Proof-of-Work can't compete with Proof-of-Stake.

That is definitely part of any plan to destroy crypto, stop the mining of bitcoin, well... I think it's not gonna happen, but it's a nice fairy tale for thought.

If mining of new bitcoin will stop tomorrow there will be an apocalyptic scene to the bitcoin protocol, there will be only unconfirmed transaction  ::)

The old Bitcoin Core clients (up to v0.3 or v0.4, I think), had a built in CPU miner. I think we should re-enable it!

Good to hear this !  ;D Does we re-enable it if mining of new bitcoin will stops tomorrow?  ;D

For CPU mining, this would not make sense. The current difficulty is so high that it would take a good two years (at least)in order for the difficulty to return to a level that is profitable for CPU mining.

If for example the difficulty were to decrease by 50% then it would need to take an extra two weeks to find 2016 blocks (this can happen either over one difficulty period or over several, however it needs to take a total of an extra two weeks). In order for the difficulty to decline by 75% (or decline a further 50% after declining 50%) i would need to take an additional 2 weeks to find an additional 2016 blocks (or a total of 4 weeks). This does not sound like a lot of time, but you need to take into consideration the fact that CPU mining is really only profitable when difficulty is in the 1,000's but right now the difficulty is just shy of 36 billion.

This means that it would need to take an extra 22 times two weeks in order for the difficulty to get to ~8500, which is still in the upper range of what would be profitable for CPU mining