Random though here:

I think the main problem with bitcoin mining is that while the network needs the largest number of user possible running as high a hashrate as possible to increase the security of the network (so long no single miner has over 51% of the total network hashrate) and increase transaction speed, the way mining works it actually "punishes" the increase in number of miners. The difficulty self adjusts every 2106 (or was it 2016) blocks so that it always takes about two weeks to mine that same amount of blocks. That being said, the more miners there are, the less everyone gets. Sure, whoever has more hashing power will always get more coins, but even then if one single person has a rig which is ten, one hundred or one thousand times as much hashing power as anyone else, if there are enough miners this miner will still only be getting a small fraction of the coins mined in those 2106 blocks.
What really matters nowadays is not how much hashing power you have, but what percentage of the networks hashing power you hold, and the more miners that join in the less percentage of the total hashing power of the network you will hold.
It seems to me that it makes very little sense for the network to need more miners, and yet reward the increase in the number of miners by giving each one smaller rewards for mining.
Just a thought, though...

Oh, and one more question. Is the fee you set received when a block is discovered or is received whenever a transaction is processed?
And one last question is every hash a transaction or how many hashes/kH/MH/GH does a transaction take?
Once again thanks for the info

You can set fees? Really? How can you do that?
And how can you determine wether or not you wish to pay the transaction fee that has been set by a miner?
Thanks for the info

I know (now) that transaction fees have always been applies. What I am suggesting and defending is that those fees should increase tho a percentage of the transaction.
Otherwise, we have a very real possibility that mining will stop being profitable, no matter what kind of mining hardware you have. And if that happens, then I don't see either mining or bitcoin surviving for very long.
Another option would be to only allow miners to perform transaction (that way, if you want to use bitcoin, you have to mine), but I believe that would be a lot harder (if not impossible) to implement. That and it would also shrink the user base which is the opposite of what should be happening.

To all the time travelling replies, I actually thought that the idea could be implemented, I thought fixes could be made to the network in case bugs were found, and I thought my suggestion, if it could be implemented, was actually a good idea.
As for quellerdrive's reply, that is indeed a very serious concern. If the calculations are correct, it seems that no hardware shipping from november onward will even be able to break even. Either the hardware's price drops steeply or we could be looking at the death of bitcoin in the very near future. Either that or the price of bitcoins has to start rising A LOT in order to make it worthwhile for people to keep mining. Even KnC's Jupiter is set to start costing more than it's making as of June 2014

Considering the hashrate of ASICs being produced right now I find it difficult to believe that enough GPU and low end ASICs will be shut down in order to make an actual difference. I believe a better way to provide an incentive to mining would be to charge a small percentage of each transaction (say 1% or 0,5%) that would be credited to the miner/miners that confirmed the transaction. This could really make the network bloom and would provide an incentive for even the lowest of hasrahte miners to stay online. Someone should suggest that to Satoshi Nakamoto...

Miner's fee? I had no idea that existed (or does it not exist yet?) Granted, that would solve the problem, but it would have to be a high enough fee to both pay for the cost of mining and still give a profit to the miner. How much is the miner's fee?

From what I understand about bitcoin (which, granted, isn't all that much), it is the mining process which actually makes the system secure by confirming transactions and stopping double spending, right?
If that truly is the case, then it seems to me that bitcoin was created with a natural expiry date.

What I mean is, once the last block has been found and the last coins have been mined, there will be no more incentive to keep mining and "giving" you processing power to make the system secure. This means that everyone who has been mining for a profit will stop doing so. Sure, there may be a few people who continue mining for nothing just for the pleasure of keeping the system running, but most people don't do anything for free, so the hashrate of the network will drop precipitously.

If the hashrate drops low enough (which it almost certainly will) all transactions will take forever to confirm which will make bitcoin impossible to use as an effective currency (who wants to use a currency that requires you to wait 6 months between the moment you make the transaction and the moment it is actually confirmed?).

This unusability, in turn, should make the price of bitcoins drop enormously instead of going up, as making it impossible to use bitcoins for actual transactions should push all hoarders to try to dump their now useless coins, creating a great increase in supply accompanied by either no change or a decrease in demand.

If all this happens (and it makes sense to me that it will) bitcoin has essentially killed itself by having a finite number of minable coins. What do you think?