Bitcoin Forum

Maybe it's a newbie question, but I suddenly thought about it.
In a few years (in terms of history), about 100 years, all the 21 million bitcoins will be on the market.
then, miner will get only transaction fees for processing the blockchain and no reward.
I believe that many of the miners will find it not profitable, and will quit out.
What do you think will happen then?

Theoretically, an equilibrium will form.
When the amount of BTC goes down due to the lowering block rewards, miners that can no longer make a profit with the fees alone will shut off their ASICS, this lowers the diff, the lower diff will make it easyer for the leftover miners to solve a block... So the leftover miners will solve more blocks with the same hashrate and rake in more fees (so have a bigger income while their expenses stay the same)... In the end, the network's hashrate might lower a bit, but theoretically, that shouldn't be a problem.

Offcourse, how much miners will decide to turn off their equipment in the end will depend on how much fee/byte will be added on average, how big the blocks will be, and it will also depend on the bitcoin price...

This equilibrium is really complicate.
from one hand, when it'll happen the bitcoin price will start to rise since there will be no flow of new coins.
but since there will be less miners, the fees might be higher, and really expensive to spend bitcoins.
but then again, if it will make people use it less, the price will go down, and even less miners will stay on the stage.
I know it will happen in more than 100 years, but I'm afraid it might be the end of this wonderful coin.

I'm more interested in the difficulty when about 19m btcs are mined. What power will it require and will that too affect the price and fees? I mean, if the mining is out of question today, what's it going to be when most of the blocks are mined. But we may not even be alive today (very probably) but it's still kind of interesting and also will the development of quantum computing lower the difficulty?

Maybe miners will start to charge high transaction fees as a means of Profit, or the creator will add more bitcoins to the market, i dont know how thats going to affect the market, but if miners dont find it profitable any longer, i think we will be buying and selling whats on the market.

We don't have to worry about it, as it still far away, like a hundred years?  ;D
When bitcoin price increase at that time, it should be sufficient to cover miners expense I guess.
There will always miners left to mine bitcoin fees, or at least I will do it,  :D, still big money obviously.

I think it is still so far away possible to our grandchildren.
Which we now enjoy first.
😀😀😀

The miner will still continue to process the transactions, the only difference is that they won't get any block reward but they still will get the transaction's fee and in 100 years I think the computing power will be way more advanced than today and would be able to mine the blocks very easily and efficiently thus only the fees would be enough for miners.

A possible scenario if ever the last block of bitcoin was mined, the transactions are still handled by miners of course. However, since there are no more rewards for every block they mine, the best way for them to continue as miners is to add transaction fees. The only way they can have profit is from transaction fees so increasing it is inevitable. Another is by increasing the block size ever further, this way the miners can process more transactions, hence, more profit.

As you mentioned it will take some 100 years and I'm pretty sure the percentage of all of us on the forum being alive is too rare , so unfortunately you will end this world with a suspense. But speaking of reaching 21 million i don't think bitcoin will ever reach that mark as the mining difficulty will increase and it won't be profit to mine using a super computer also and mostly probably people will dump bitcoin

Transaction fees are already enough for the miners. The mining reward is simply a gift.

At the rate things are going now fees will already be higher than the blockreward in the next halving or 2. But as for whether its profitable or not will depend on the amount they gather in fees and the price of the btc at that time.

Even the current scaling solutions promise to pay miners more and more in fees so this will never be a problem and is exactly what satoshi had in mind with the mining fees.

I'm not a technician but I think that what we are witnessing right now it that BTC was never meant to get this big in terms of transactions, maybe it was never meant to do that, and just to store value.

If that is going to work or not, if they can solve that problem or not, is a mystery to me. At this point I think BTC future is in a 50/50 situation.

As for ETH and other alt coins that "corrected" BTC mistakes from birth, I think the future is bright

Just to add this, I think LTC (or ETH, but ETH is much more than that) can easily occupy that "space" for a worldwide just-for-transaction cryptocurrency.

As for other altcoins (or tokens) some of them are attached to revolutionary blockchain projects that will change most of our daily online hobbies, like social networks, online markets, cloud storage, and many other things that blockchain can make cheaper and much more efficient.

Some of those projects are still very undervalued. And that's why a few mid and low cap altcoins will make the new crypto millionaires of this decade (not BTC, ETH, or any other big cap altcoin)

As it stands right now the fees are very high and miners are making a lot of profit from them. The fact the bitcoin price is soo high gets them a huge bonus when they solve a block and get the reward.


Right now i dont think the miners even need the block reward, the fee is enough to keep them going.

So if you think about it like this. Say btc is 15,000 when next halving happens, and block size is 10mb or higher. The fee would still probably be 2 to 5 dollars in total or even lower.

The fees will balance things out so that its still profitable for miners. At the end of the day all that will happen if we aren't paying enough to keep rewardless blocks going is that the miners will demand more fees. That may sound terrible considering the fees we already pay right now but we must have faith that the community will eventually pull itself together for a real solution that will benefit both users and miners.

The miners will process the transactions, there is no alternative.

The fee would be at least 4x the current price to keep the BTC reward at the same amount as now. So better pray for higher prices in the future, so the fee in BTC should not have to be that big.

I wonder if this theory can already be put to the test approaching the tenth year of the network. I have a feeling this equilibrium is already demonstrable - rising fees with rising price means the assumption of more profit but this is probably only catching up with extra cost to mine and spread among increasing hashrate, meaning more or less the same income as before. Anyone know research we can look at?

Stabilization based on transaction fees and block size the value of a single coin will remain the incentive to keep the mining capacity near an equilibrium but in all likelihood merge mine and side-chains would provide alternative incentive mechanisms to the market.
Either way miners will get a fair deal and the difficulty will adjust to the proper level for price incentive.

Assuming bitcoin price continue on its upwards trajectory, I would say they'd still find maintaining their equipment and processing transactions to be profitable. You can just look at the price of the fees per transaction now.


I hope so, with plenty of alts around, it's kind of hard to decide which to place our money on. I mean, it is risky after all. Some coins just get pumped to the moon and then dumped and never recover. Even if you invest your money in an alt that seem to have a promising plan, there is then the risk of cashing out when you see its price going up.  :-[

we wont be here to see that happening !! enjoy it now while you can !

first of all, we can never really hit 21 million bitcoins. Bitcoin block rewards will half every 4 years or so(210000 blocks), which means that it'll be infinitely closer to 21 million every year but it'll never hit 21 million bitcoins.

To answer your question - bitcoin miners right now are already getting a lot more in transaction fees in lieu of decreasing bitcoin block rewards. This will be even more so in the future when block rewards further decrease.

They will not receive reward per block anymore but they will receive bitcoin as the transaction fee which is high enough for them to continue mining bitcoin. Well, if no one wants to confirm transactions anymore, I think we will move to other crypto and bitcoin will not be used anymore. Let's hope that this situation will not happen.

It seems to me that the intention was that should that time ever come, miners would be earning from transactions alone. If every coin has been mined out, then the amount in circulation would be stable. Hard to tell what the price would be but I suppose there'd be less volatility.

I think the developers of bitcoin has thought about that. Not worry about that, now the fee minimum is 0.001 to make quick transaction, below that your bitcoin will be slow. If bitcoin prices touch $10000 to $15000. I think the miners will stil get profit from transaction fee reward. How much is 0.001 x 15000 = 150 US. I think to pay the electric bill is still enough for the miners. Or at least many bitcoin community still mine bitcoin for no p rofit. Don't worry about that.  

This is where you go wrong. That's a food for thought no doubt but there will always be a way to figure out the obstacles before it really happens. As we are not hitting the dead mark right now and there is ample time to find a probable solution for it, we will definitely find a way out.

When all bitcoins got mined out, you cannot imagine what will be the price of one bitcoins. I assume one bitcoin may value 100 million dollars, it means one satoshi = 1 USD. At the same time the transaction volume also will be in huge numbers so there will be enough possibilities for miners to earn better than what they are earning right now.

Still, the transaction processes will be handled by miners. Some might quit mining since there is no block bonus at that moment. The only possible way is to increase the block size so that more transaction will be processed at a time then the miner will gain from the process. Also, the transaction fee will be increased. These are the only possible way to make miners process transaction after the last bitcoin was mined.

I had the same question as OP before I read this thread. From reading here I realize that it was still possible. Since the miners profit from "block rewards" this means that it is actually just some sort of "reward" which in time will decrease until it becomes zero. Then miners will only find blocks and not really be rewarded anymore. So I guess when block rewards goes to 0, then the miners will be mining for the fees. I can't imagine though how much fees will we be paying at that time and how long will each miner find a new block.

Miners as usual, it was designed that way since Satoshi visioned that by the time all Bitcoins are mined, the market are already saturated and that a block will give a reward that is more than the initial reward of 50 BTC due to the number of people doing bitcoin transactions and paying transaction fee. 

I think it's not a problem. Any computer on the network can process the transaction. I'm sure there are many who earn a few Satoshi in parallel with the work on the computer. For me the important thing is to improve circulation of currency and can be in any country without leaving home to earn money.

According to the bitcoin whitepaper the block rewards halves every four years until the final coin was mined and no more rewards will be distributed (correct me if i were wrong) right? I guess the miners will rely on the transaction fees but i think it will be pretty high if you compared the situation today and in the future without block rewards