What if there is nomore coins to mine?

[Next BillG]

It will be the same as now, it could rise and could fall. The only difference is with the miners. They will only mine bitcoin transactions and no actual bitcoins, so i dont know what will happen with the fees. The needs for HASH power will definetly be smaller though.

The miners will use the fees to pay for the cost and profit. The need for hash will not drop if the bitcoin value is high.

[allthingsluxury]

Hopefully the bitcoin market will then stabilize at a very comfortable level and it will be all about the fees for the miners.

[Amph]

Hopefully the bitcoin market will then stabilize at a very comfortable level and it will be all about the fees for the miners.

this must be true, because if we are still sitting at 1k-10k range of value, then bitcoin is doomed for sure, miners will not be able to receive enough reward to keep the network alive

unless a small sum is forwarded to incentivate the running of full node...

[NorrisK]

Hopefully the bitcoin market will then stabilize at a very comfortable level and it will be all about the fees for the miners.

It should stabilize yes, but not at a fixed price level.

I think stable and predictable growth would be a better phrasing of what we need. 20% growth or decline in a week is insane, but over a year for example would be perfect for the future.

[Kprawn]

Miners will still be able to turn a profit from transaction fees.

this assuming that the value of bitcoin is very high, to have the same profit as they have now a farm of 1 peta for example, need to earn 4.43 btc a day($2k)

this mean that the value of bitcoin must be in the range of 1000x higher, assuming that they can earn 400k in fee each day in the future

so basically the same marketcap as gold...

Yea, I also thought of the same thing a while back and it sounds insane. We are bargaining on a lot of things to happen to sustain the network. We hope transaction volumes will

go through the roof and the miners fees will increase to reach a level where it can replace bitcoins as a miner reward. We hope people and businesses will burn electricity to

sustain the network. The probability is high, but it stays an experiment. We determine the outcome of this experiment...

[helloeverybody]

The problem that i think bitcoin would have in the future is if we dont have enough of a user base then by the time all bitcoins are mined there wouldnt be enough fees to cover miners. Saying that i think the final mined bitcoins are quite some time away and if we dont have a better user base by then , then we never will.

[oblivi]

It is safe to assume that by 2140, new methods of mining Bitcoin will be around, maybe Quantum Computers are already available and we can mine Bitcoins in a viable way, so I wouldn't be worried of it becoming unsustainable.

[helloeverybody]

It is safe to assume that by 2140, new methods of mining Bitcoin will be around, maybe Quantum Computers are already available and we can mine Bitcoins in a viable way, so I wouldn't be worried of it becoming unsustainable.

by 2140 bitcoin would have to be a mental prices to cover the cost of mining , Im assuming by then everything would be more expensive. Wont really matter too much to any of us by then anyway though,you never know , maybe your bitcoin you earned today will be worth a fortune to your kids or grand kids in a few years time.

[teonoaro]

Miners receive transaction fees as rewards from transactions occurring in each block. New coin production will take long time to finish. There will be 3 or more generations came into existence from now. We don't know or can't say, what will be the future of bitcoin? how well will it be recognized by people all over the world. Predicting a guess now is a good idea and is a very good brainstorming thing.

[RodeoX]

Hopefully the bitcoin market will then stabilize at a very comfortable level and it will be all about the fees for the miners.

this must be true, because if we are still sitting at 1k-10k range of value, then bitcoin is doomed for sure, miners will not be able to receive enough reward to keep the network alive

unless a small sum is forwarded to incentivate the running of full node...

I see this as self regulating. If the fee is too low to be profitable then it will simply go up. You can include a tiny fee, but it may not get picked up and so the user pays a price that attracts interest. In the future it is likely that fees will rise. However any competitors (like PayPal) charges huge fees for the same service and can not possibly compete with the bitcoin system.  Think of each Tx as a contract offer and the winner is the lowest bid.

[Amph]

Hopefully the bitcoin market will then stabilize at a very comfortable level and it will be all about the fees for the miners.

this must be true, because if we are still sitting at 1k-10k range of value, then bitcoin is doomed for sure, miners will not be able to receive enough reward to keep the network alive

unless a small sum is forwarded to incentivate the running of full node...

I see this as self regulating. If the fee is too low to be profitable then it will simply go up. You can include a tiny fee, but it may not get picked up and so the user pays a price that attracts interest. In the future it is likely that fees will rise. However any competitors (like PayPal) charges huge fees for the same service and can not possibly compete with the bitcoin system.  Think of each Tx as a contract offer and the winner is the lowest bid.

yeah the network can regulate itself but the demand must be there, otherwise if you simply increase the fee to, dunno 100k satoshi, or even 0.01-0.1 range, but the value is just 10k

it mean that the reward will be very low for the miner, i don't have data right now about how many fee are generated nowadays, and how much will be generated in the future, with a better adoption

[RodeoX]

yeah the network can regulate itself but the demand must be there, otherwise if you simply increase the fee to, dunno 100k satoshi, or even 0.01-0.1 range, but the value is just 10k

it mean that the reward will be very low for the miner, i don't have data right now about how many fee are generated nowadays, and how much will be generated in the future, with a better adoption

Those are thoughts worth considering Amph. Very low levels of use could lead to truly high fees. I suppose that would be scaling also, but not the kind we want. 

[hazenyc]

It is interesting to see how people think about this "problem" now and how they thought about it 4&5 years ago before ASIC dominance..

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=67900.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6284.0

[Amph]

nothing... my other post was wrong, from the look of the blockchain stats it seems that there are 32 btc in fee each day which is somehow 1/100 of the total bitcoin mined today

this simply means that the value in future must increase 100x, or the fee increased to 100x(0.01+) or the number of total transactions per day raised to 100x which means 20M per day

but the last point is hindered by the block limit, and even 8MB will not suffice

[btcprospecter]

From what I understand the miners will get fees. Maybe then it might be viable for us to get into mining. I imagine most the big miners will shut up shop so we will have to keep things going ourselves.

[plorph]

I like bitcoin for the ease of transacting. If we need sufficiently higher fees for the miners, that's going to take away transaction volume which is important for an economy.. how is that supposed to work? BItcoin seems to be heading towards "large transactions only"?

[mudiko]

I like bitcoin for the ease of transacting. If we need sufficiently higher fees for the miners, that's going to take away transaction volume which is important for an economy.. how is that supposed to work? BItcoin seems to be heading towards "large transactions only"?

Less hash power will solve it. It's not a huge problem to think about. What more important is the size of the user base for the future of BTC.

[johnyj]

I like bitcoin for the ease of transacting. If we need sufficiently higher fees for the miners, that's going to take away transaction volume which is important for an economy.. how is that supposed to work? BItcoin seems to be heading towards "large transactions only"?

Less hash power will solve it. It's not a huge problem to think about. What more important is the size of the user base for the future of BTC.

Less hash power will make the system more vulnerable to attack, especially when there are many retired old generation mining rigs which can be bought cheaply to assemble an attack

I think it will be best that the hash rate continuously climb without stop, similar to bitcoin's supply continuously shrink without stop, thus the security of the network is forever increasing. However, that will depend on two variables: Exchange rate and Miner's fee income

Suppose that exchange rate doubles every 4 years, then the income of miners will remain the same after reward halving. Notice that reward halving is a cut-off event while exchange rate won't jump 100% over night, so basically when the reward halving happens, hash rate is always following the exchange rate, and some kind of shock would still be observed: Halving will reduce the hash rate for a while similar to a difficulty jump of 100%, until new generation chips are manufactured

However, if exchange rate do not change a lot during a 4+ years' period, then the miner's income will really become less, but due to the same reason as above, the hash rate will always self-adjust to the most stable status where majority of the miners can make a small profit

But diminishing mining COIN income is a bad thing. The success of bitcoin is mostly based on the fact that people can through mining get lots of bitcoins. If you can not get enough coins through mining, then it is like a centrally planned economy where early adopters already sitting tight on majority of the coins and preventing future people to get enough coins, kind of market manipulation similar to central banks holding large amount of gold reserve but never use them

So it is better to slowly raise the fee and keep the future mining income per block above 10 bitcoin at least, so that miner act as a money redistributor, constantly receive money from existing users against the transaction service to avoid wealth concentration

[Next BillG]

nothing... my other post was wrong, from the look of the blockchain stats it seems that there are 32 btc in fee each day which is somehow 1/100 of the total bitcoin mined today

this simply means that the value in future must increase 100x, or the fee increased to 100x(0.01+) or the number of total transactions per day raised to 100x which means 20M per day

but the last point is hindered by the block limit, and even 8MB will not suffice

If the difficulty keeps on rising, even the 100x price rise is not enough. Does it indicate the price will rise more than 100x?

[btcdevil]

nothing... my other post was wrong, from the look of the blockchain stats it seems that there are 32 btc in fee each day which is somehow 1/100 of the total bitcoin mined today

this simply means that the value in future must increase 100x, or the fee increased to 100x(0.01+) or the number of total transactions per day raised to 100x which means 20M per day

but the last point is hindered by the block limit, and even 8MB will not suffice

If the difficulty keeps on rising, even the 100x price rise is not enough. Does it indicate the price will rise more than 100x?

I think when the mining will stop but what all said the transaction fees will be moving it and the buying and selling of bitcoins will be their in the market so the transaction fees will me more so their should not be any problem.

Then i think who ever is keeping high stock of bitcoins will raise the price and sell the bitcoins so the price raise will also be their. with every high price the transaction fees will also be get riched