What if we run out of Bitcoin?

[PinkLlama]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

[merelcoin]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

That's the concept... Eventually, the block reward will be almost nothing... Dust...
By then, the transaction fees should be enough to cover the mining expenses. If the fees aren't enough, most miners will stop mining, the diff will drop and the leftover miners will find more blocks, thus claiming more fees.

What (hopefully) also will happen, is by then a lot of coins will be lost + a lot of extra users will use bitcoin, so the price will rise exponentially, which is great for early adopters 

[jacee]

As long as the people uses bitcoin it will never really change anything even if the coins were already all mined. The price could change. Yes. But how it circulates will never change. The only difference is that there will be no more fresh bitcoins.

[TastyChillySauce00]

the miners will got their block solving reward from the fees, i think, when the block size increased, the gathered fees will have pretty high value, and it'll be distributed to those miners,and the price will rise,so no problem at all to those miners, but just for example ,when in a day 10BTC lost because of some people lost control of his wallet/address,and this thing didn't stop to happen day by day,maybe someday bitcoin will get lost

[JesusHadAegis]

I think it will just be distributed to any online transaction. New schemes and styles on how to mine btc. New alt coins. Everything will just be new. And it will recognized someday by people. And maybe it will not just be online transaction.

[BitcoinSupremo]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

That's the concept... Eventually, the block reward will be almost nothing... Dust...
By then, the transaction fees should be enough to cover the mining expenses. If the fees aren't enough, most miners will stop mining, the diff will drop and the leftover miners will find more blocks, thus claiming more fees.

What (hopefully) also will happen, is by then a lot of coins will be lost + a lot of extra users will use bitcoin, so the price will rise exponentially, which is great for early adopters 

I am trying to collect as much BTC as I can for that moment when it will come, hopefully it will come true, otherwise I would have lost quite a lot of time of my life collecting this amount of BTC for nothing if the price doesn't rise exponentially.

[merelcoin]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

That's the concept... Eventually, the block reward will be almost nothing... Dust...
By then, the transaction fees should be enough to cover the mining expenses. If the fees aren't enough, most miners will stop mining, the diff will drop and the leftover miners will find more blocks, thus claiming more fees.

What (hopefully) also will happen, is by then a lot of coins will be lost + a lot of extra users will use bitcoin, so the price will rise exponentially, which is great for early adopters 

I am trying to collect as much BTC as I can for that moment when it will come, hopefully it will come true, otherwise I would have lost quite a lot of time of my life collecting this amount of BTC for nothing if the price doesn't rise exponentially.

I know what you mean, i rarely spend any coin, but i try to do as much tasks in my free time to hoard BTC because i believe it will tenfold in price in the next years to come...

[mindrust]

You can't run out of bitcoin. If it ever happens, then bitcoin will be dead. Nothing hard to be predicted.

[HeroCat]

At that time some altcoins will be popular too, so people can switch to altcoins. Currently, for example, Doge is still popular crypto with fast transaction time. 

[mayax]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

That's the concept... Eventually, the block reward will be almost nothing... Dust...
By then, the transaction fees should be enough to cover the mining expenses. If the fees aren't enough, most miners will stop mining, the diff will drop and the leftover miners will find more blocks, thus claiming more fees.

What (hopefully) also will happen, is by then a lot of coins will be lost + a lot of extra users will use bitcoin, so the price will rise exponentially, which is great for early adopters 

and how BTC can become mainstream(a currency) in this way?   it's a non sense and it shows that BTC system is weak.

[Dr.Osh]

Well, I never thought that bitcoin will be exhausted, because bitcoin will always grow, but if it occurs, may bitcoin will be items difficult step in the search and make the price further increase

[merelcoin]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

That's the concept... Eventually, the block reward will be almost nothing... Dust...
By then, the transaction fees should be enough to cover the mining expenses. If the fees aren't enough, most miners will stop mining, the diff will drop and the leftover miners will find more blocks, thus claiming more fees.

What (hopefully) also will happen, is by then a lot of coins will be lost + a lot of extra users will use bitcoin, so the price will rise exponentially, which is great for early adopters  

and how BTC can become mainstream(a currency) in this way?  it's a non sense and it shows that BTC system is weak.

What would be the problem with my explanation? It does not contradict bitcoin becoming mainstream imho. Neither does it show bitcoin to be weak.

In total 21.000.000 coins will be mined. Some of them are lost (sent to addresses without known private keys), some of them are satoshi's, some of them are in the hands of a couple of people who will not touch them... The rest can be sent and received... The transactions between people will be included in blocks because each tx will pay a fee to the miner who includes the tx in a block. This will happen regardless of the fact if the block reward is high or very, very, very low.

The miner will keep the fees, the people can pay with bitcoin, buy bitcoin, sell bitcoin,... The more people there are, and the more coins get lost, the higher the price will be.
If eventually the price becomes really high, one can add a couple more zero's (at the moment, the smallest ammount of bitcoin one can count is 0.00000001, but this is not set in stone... The dev's can make 0.0000000001 the smallest ammount if they wish... So even if 20.000.000 of the 21.000.000 gets lost, we can still use the leftover bitcoins to pay for our needs) 

[virtualvip]

Bitcoin will not be ran out as long as blockchain is there!

[n0ne]

At that time some altcoins will be popular too, so people can switch to altcoins. Currently, for example, Doge is still popular crypto with fast transaction time. 

As quoted some alts will try to take the place of bitcoin. But looking back the days from its existence it has never felt such a mining issue even when it was sold at very low price. So this won't happen anymore.

[goinmerry]

Then we can just circulate it but it needed to be used not just stocked. By the time it is depleted it will need some movement everytime so that people will also knew that there is this kind of currency that can be used online.

[iqlimasyadiqa]

if bitcoin stopped then the price of bitcoin will automatically climb. bitcoin will be increasingly difficult to obtain due to the high demand for bitcoin. the higher the demand, the higher the price of bitcoin on the market.

[Amph]

the supply is almost 21M not 20M, and anyway the point is not in the numbers of coins, but in their value

quality over quantity this is the philosophy, in comparison to the fiat inflation thing, where they print endless

[DuckKeeper]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

Yes do you think there's a limit for it. Haven't heard about that before also because they don't
give much publicity to the coin, but i don't think there is a limit mining can still be remaining.

[MaritiJames3]

What will happen if we run out of Bitcoin? I think the supply is 20,000,000 BTC and that we already have more than half of that. What will we do when BTC stops being mined?

Can we really run out of Bitcoins? I think that if we run out of Bitcoins they have to create more but that will devalue the Bitcoin. So that would not be a good thing.

[dwdoc]

As long as there is one bitcoin left, the network can function since it can be subdivided without limit. However there is a question about whether transaction fees can ever by themselves be high enough to guarantee there is enough mining to secure Bitcoin against attacks.  Some have even said that in the future a government might have to take over mining if it views Bitcoin as a public good, e.g. a public utility.

http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/876/how-much-will-transaction-fees-eventually-be