if the number of transactions doesn't pick up by 8/16 miners will have to quit

[jonald_fyookball]

I'm confident that if the network doesn't double in hash once it matures every year aka grow in accordance to Moore's law, then the network will become insecure and miners will abandon it for other, more miner friendly, PoW currencies.

How do you figure?  the network is supposedly already more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined.  If it shrinks a little bit,
it's still plenty secure.

What do you mean by "miner friendly"

[Sweft]

I'm confident that if the network doesn't double in hash once it matures every year aka grow in accordance to Moore's law, then the network will become insecure and miners will abandon it for other, more miner friendly, PoW currencies.

How do you figure?  the network is supposedly already more powerful than the world's top 500 supercomputers combined.  If it shrinks a little bit,
it's still plenty secure.

What do you mean by "miner friendly"

What I mean by miner friendly is a cryptocurrency that has more than one revenue source for miners, or an inflationary PoW cryptocurrency.  A cryptocurrency with a fixed amount of bitcoins will eventually solely rely on tx fee's to support mining growth.  An inflationary currency will rely on tx fee's as well as block reward.  The only question is the amount of inflation that is required to balance mining profits and price stability.

[jonald_fyookball]

if bitcoin continues its dominance over other cryptos and also reaches a certain
size, the tx fees could be large.

...or it could get overtaken by another coin (although we'll see it coming).
will be interesting.  the thing about alt coins competing with bitcoin
is they have such low adoption and low relative value, with maybe
the exception of litecoin.  so, no one can really say right now what
will happen because there are too many unknown variables.

[vpitcher07]

The block reward is scheduled to be halved on around august 2016.
when that happens unless the amount of transactions fees rises to compensate for the reward drop,
mining will become unprofitable and the hash rate will drop rapidly.
what can be done to prevent this 

What needs to be prevented, exactly? And why?

People saying bullshit like "mining will become unprofitable" clearly haven't got a clue how mining and the adaptive difficulty works.

Minnig will always remain profitable for "enough" people. ALWAYS.

That remains true until all Bitcoins are created. Then the only reward is transaction fees which as of right now is pretty much nothing.

[DeathAndTaxes]

That remains true until all Bitcoins are created. Then the only reward is transaction fees which as of right now is pretty much nothing.

If Bitcoin isn't any larger than it is now then in a hundred years or so it won't really matter.  Realistically even a decade from now Bitcoin will be much larger or it won't exist.

[jonald_fyookball]

That remains true until all Bitcoins are created. Then the only reward is transaction fees which as of right now is pretty much nothing.

If Bitcoin isn't any larger than it is now then in a hundred years or so it won't really matter.  Realistically even a decade from now Bitcoin will be much larger or it won't exist.

oh yeahh....thats right, mining new coins will continue for some time.  boy Satoshi thought of everything

[superdork]

if only there where other coins that could be mined... that wouldn't have a black reward reduction at that exact same time, thus providing an alternative , man wouldn't something like that be sweet? Like a Lite version of bitcoin... or some sorts of alternate coins, altcoins if you will. But that is just crazy talk, it would never happen.

[ThirdRenaissance]

The endgame for Bitcoin is either rise to power or dive into oblivion. The former ensures high enough fees by virtue of its design.

[Sweft]

The endgame for Bitcoin is either rise to power or dive into oblivion. The former ensures high enough fees by virtue of its design.

Genius.

[Brangdon]

Moore's law is about the number of transistors on a processor. Processor speed is generally a byproduct, but hasn't kept up in percentage terms for quite a while now.

That's mainly because most software written for general purpose CPUs doesn't scale well to many threads. Mining does scale well, so I'd expect hash power to increase with the number of transistors.

Minnig will always remain profitable for "enough" people. ALWAYS.

That remains true until all Bitcoins are created. Then the only reward is transaction fees which as of right now is pretty much nothing.

Total transaction fees will surely increase over time. Either by the number of transactions increasing, or the fee per transaction, or both. At the moment mining is effectively paid for by inflation. As that ends, we may find that Bitcoin transactions are no cheaper than credit card ones.