Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin mining verifies transactions on the block chain.  Eventually people might stop doing this once the mining reward becomes too small or once mining is over 100+ years from now.
Would advanced mining (quantum) solve this making only a few miners necessary to verify transactions?

What are your thoughts?

Assuming bitcoin survives that long, the ining of new coins will be replaced by transaction fees. The miners can choose whatever transactions they want to add to the block, so they may choose to not add any transactions where the fee is less than 1% of the amount transferred or whatever.

There will never be a time where "only a few miners" are necessary - then "a few" other miners could do a doublespend (51% attack). This is why so much hashpower is needed - now to do a 51% attack you would have to obtain 23PH/s (in case you manage to convince existing miners to help you) or 45PH/s (in case you have to buy new equipment).

I wouldn't worry about that.

It's going to be decades before the block reward is close to 0.

Bitcoin will collapse before then.

It halves approximately every 4 years, so in 2016-08 it's going to be BTC12.5, in 2020 BTC6.25, 2024 BTC3.125…

2020 and 2024 already seem quite low unless there is significant increase in price of bitcoin.

However, if there's not increase in price and transaction volume (for tx fees) then bitcoin won't be a success anyway, so it's academic.

Your understanding of how bitcoin works is deeply flawed.

I suggest taking some time to learn a bit more before you start to panic about what is going to happen in the future.

Please explain us what's wrong with his question.

Thanks!

It's not the question, it's the assertion: "Eventually people might stop doing this once the mining reward becomes too small or once mining is over 100+ years from now." As others have pointed out above, transaction fees exist. This is pretty fundamental: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#After_21_million_coins_are_mined.2C_no_one_will_generate_new_blocks (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#After_21_million_coins_are_mined.2C_no_one_will_generate_new_blocks)

I'm not sure there is anything "right" with his question.


This is not correct.  Every peer on the network verifies every transaction and every block.  All bitcoin "mining" does is "confirm" the transaction.  More specifically, it determines a consensus on the order of transactions.


The size of the mining reward is the sum of the block subsidy plus all of the transaction fees of all the transactions that are included in the block. When people talk about the "mining reward" becoming small, they are almost always concerned about the fact that the block subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks.  As such, they generally ignore (or are unaware of) two important facts.

• While the block subsidy might be smaller in terms of total numbers of bitcoins, success of bitcoin will almost certainly result in a larger value per unit.  Therefore, if bitcoin is successful, then the smaller number of units in the future will carry larger value.  If bitcoin is not successful, then it doesn't really matter whether any miners stick around to "confirm" transactions.
• The value of the sum of the transaction fees is expected to increase to eventually compensate the miners for the work they do.  This is clearly specified in the original Bitcoin Whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto.  Anyone who is going to try to discuss how bitcoin works, and what the threats are to its future existence needs to have, at the bare minimum, read that document.  Otherwise, they are almost certainly wasting their own time and the time of others with concerns (like this one) that have already been explained in this forum and on reddit thousands of times.

This is complete misunderstanding of what mining does and how it accomplishes it.  There is nothing about quantum technology that would allow increased security with reduced participation in the proof-of-work process.


As I've explained, my thoughts are that you need to take some time to learn a bit more about how bitcoin works before you panic about things you don't understand.

It's a bit like me going to an automobile engineering discussion forum and posting:

"I heard that automobiles use sparks to ignite the explosions that make the vehicle move.  What if someday electricity becomes too expensive?  Could we light the explosions with matches instead?"

Very well! Tks for clarifying!

Artificial intelligence entities, just like us.

you really dont belong here if you really think bitcoin will be dead in 50 years or less.  bitcoin will survive in other means for as of the clones will survive.

Transaction- fees are used to pay the miners to keep the system running. If you're not in a hurry, or don't need that many confirmations (for example micropayments)  pay small fee, or if want many confirmations fast, pay bigger fee, the market sets the price. It's self-regulating, like many things with btc.

Presumably, the adoption of Bitcoin by that time will be so widespread, with so much transacted on a daily basis around the globe, that transaction income may someday pay more than the base block reward ever did. Even if it doesn't, the amount of hardware deployed in support of the network will just contract, causing the difficulty to back way off and the network continues to steam ahead with fewer machines running it.

I would say that the scalability of the blockchain and the capacity in trx per sec is a much bigger concern than this :-)