Bitcoin Forum

Really? I just got into all this mining/bitcoin business and they are cutting rewards in half? This sucks, is there any possible way that they go up again? I'm not entirely familiar with the system and how it works..

No, block reward will half about every four years. Eventually there will be no reward and miners will be financed entirely by transaction fees.

But difficulty will adjust and this is also important for calculating mining profits.

But aren't transaction fees optional?

Don't know about fees but the price of BTC should rise soon after the reduction,by how much ? Who knows ???

Maybe to $10  ???

They?

It is an algorithm.

But for the when, .. sometime around December 9th, plus or minus a week.
 - http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67185.0

In the future miners will probably only include transactions that have at least a minimum % fee, and if you want your transaction to be processed in a reasonable amount of time you will have to pay it.

It is uncertain at this time what effect the reward drop will have on bitcoins value.

But my guess is the value will drop before hand due to this uncertainty and then rise again after.

Care to explain your reasoning?  ???

Yes, but miners processing zero-fee transactions is also optional. ;)

To elaborate, right now the block reward is so large that miners just don't care about transactions fees, and are (usually) willing to process zero-fee transactions simply because it makes no significant difference to their profit whether transaction fees are included or not. But after the block reward drops a few times, miners will start prioritising transactions with high fees (because that's where their profit is) while transactions with low or no fees get ignored.

LOL, there's your problem right there. If you spent 30 min reading the wiki page, you'd know the block reward is set to halve every time half the remaining coins are mined. 21,000,000 / 2 = 10,500,000, right now we're at 8,949,150.

How much do you think the fees will go up?

The cost of mining is related to difficulty, so the fee will adjust to whatever people are prepared to pay.

But remember the lower the difficulty the less secure bitcoin will be.

So a better question is, how much are you prepared to pay in order to keep bitcoin secure.

I'm 99% certain the rules will be changed to keep miners and therefore the securers of the network online. Possibly in the form of an increased Total Coin ceiling.

I just don't see 50% of the network sticking around for the "fees".

But that's at least a decade away from becoming a real problem, there'll be other currencies by then.

Perhaps a new currency will be started that secures the BTC network while issuing it's own currency.

Man, this is gonna be interesting, can't wait.  ;D

We are already paying fees.

The constant creation of coins lowers the value of all existing coins.

The only reason we don't notice this is because the number of $ invested in bitcoins is also going up.

The rules cannot and will not change. The total number of coins cannot be increased.

I do. Right now, fees are about 0.1% of the block reward (at least they were last time I checked). If the fee per transaction stays the same and transaction volume increases by 1000 times, the resulting total fees will be equivalent to the current block reward. There's no problem here unless transaction volume doesn't increase enough, in which case Bitcoin is doomed anyway.

Again, that depends on the votes of the miners and whether or not a slight decrease in value is worth the security a larger network would provide.


Not sure if you're trolling, or just ignorant.


By the time the transaction volume increases by 1000x, the number of miners will also have increased by a significant amount, reducing everyone's share of the fee.

From what I'm reading right now what you guys posted the only thing i see is: Market Collapse

there seems to be a misconception that in a free market the miners control the price - this is incorrect, the market determines the price. The only way miners can affect the price strongly is by dumping coins and crashing the market - sort of the opposite of what most miners desire...

there will only ever be 21million Bitcoins produced - no troll, go read some stuff before accusing ppl of ignorance
from
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin
Currency
Unlike conventional fiat currency, Bitcoin has no centralized issuing authority.[13][22][23] The network is programmed to grow the money supply as a geometric series until the total number of bitcoins reaches 21 million BTC

Completely possible, but being decentralized, Bitcoin is far more rooted than any Fiat currency. So regardless of how it collapses, it will always exist in some form.

That's the idea, anyway.

Never said there would be. But the rules of bitcoin can be changed, whether you like it or not.

is there any way to remove the 21 million limit? it would be cooler if the limit was somehow tied with the ammount of users using bitcoin, or ammount of transactions there were in past few blocks, or something like that

Miners don't vote on the value of bitcoin, the market does. If the supply of bitcoins increases beyond the demand for bitcoins, the value will go down, regardless of what the miners do.

Any block which doesn't follow the rules will be rejected by nodes that do. Any attempt to change to the rules will fail for this reason. Explain how it is otherwise.

They number of miners will not increase beyond the point where mining is no longer profitable. Unless incentives change radically (and I've explained why I don't think they will), the total hashpower of the network will increase in accordance with Moore's law (and so does the hashpower of any attackers, so if security is good enough now, it'll be good enough for the future). Whether this means the same number of miners with more powerful rigs, or more miners with less powerful rigs, I don't know, and I don't care either - the effect is the same as far as the security of the network is concerned.

You seem to have missed my point on the "Miners Vote" issue. No, they do not decide the value of a Bitcoin. They can decide what they sell it at, but ultimately it's the buyer that decides what they are willing to pay.

The Miners can decide on what rules they mine by. And yes, if one rogue node changes the rules it gets rejected. But if enough nodes "vote" on changing the rules, that is, they mine with a different set of rules, then the majority rules.

This is how miners "vote".


This is a very shortsighted statement.

I don't get what all the denial is about here. Wishing and arguing that it's impossible doesn't help, it's a possibility, and a threat to the whole network.

Unless I'm wrong, in which case the whole 51% attack fiasco is a non-issue.

Only if over 50% of the network agrees on it. The implications of that however would be staggering.

Wrong. You can't change the rules with over 50% of the miners, you need the support of virtually 100% of the nodes, including non-miners. Nodes that don't follow the new rules will reject blocks mined under the new rules. At best this will result in the blockchain being forked; more likely, the blocks following the new rule just won't propagate through the network, and all the effort mining them will be wasted. While there are a lot of things you can do if you have the support of more than 50% of the miners, changing the core rules isn't one of them.

No it isn't. Because the attacker's hashing power increases at exactly the same rate as the network hashing power, the security threat in the future is exactly the same as it is now. I never said that there was no threat, just that whatever threat there is will be no greater in the future than it is now.

Supply & demand..........miners will create less BTC,so if future demand stays close to what is now,there will be less BTC so your gonna pay more per.

I'm just guessing so...............................

oops, Didn't see this was the noob section. Should know better than to argue the ignorance here.

EDIT: Actually, out of curiosity, I'm gonna post this question elsewhere. (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=79937) I'd like to see if this is actually viable or not.

https://i.imgur.com/ffLYa.jpg
I asked my buddy George, He said expect $8 usd to be the new stable price in 1st quarter 2013.