If mining is essentially hosting a ledger and supporting the transfers of bitcoin, how will bitcoin survive past 2017 when they say they will stop producing at 21 million? If the miners are not being rewarded with bitcoin they will stop hosting the ledger and bitcoin transactions will end.
What am I missing?
2017 only marks the next reward split, from 25 coins per block down to 12.5...which will give us another 4 years before the next split to 6.25..and so on. We'll technically never reach the
exact 21 million, and there will be a point when solving blocks doesn't generate any reward at all.
Instead, the reward would be the transaction fees..which I imagine will go up once the normal block rewards prove to be less fruitful.
