What will happen when people stop mining?

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[Rob P.]

If people stop mining, Bitcoin will die.

Miners confirm transactions by adding them to the Block Chain.  If no one is doing that, there is no Bitcoin.

Miners won't stop mining because they get to earn all of the transaction fees on the transactions in the blocks they add to the Block Chain.

[you2]

First the price of each BTC will rise to the sky, because there are no new BTC created (deflation scenario)!

But like Rob P. said, without Miners, there are no transaction possible.

[BitCoinsForGold]

Theres something said about transaction fee's. But i think it will be a very difficult time for bitcoins, or bitcoins will go thru the roof. Either or

[grod]

There aren't enough use cases for bitcoins right now which would support either a large number or a high enough transaction fee.  At least nowhere near the payout of a 50 btc reward for confirming a block today.  We can safely ignore the influence of fees -- several pools keep the fees and only split the reward and nobody cares very much about it.

It's happened before, on a much smaller scale.  We'll see what the current effects are next difficulty increase or the one after that.  The supply of bitcoins entering the bitcoin economy isn't as important as the supply of new dollars or new tradable goods being available for bitcoins.  Short term I believe the first (dollars) may be affected as all the newcomers attracted to bitcoins when it was a way to make a few bucks on the side get bored and leave.

[Rob P.]

There aren't enough use cases for bitcoins right now which would support either a large number or a high enough transaction fee.  At least nowhere near the payout of a 50 btc reward for confirming a block today.  We can safely ignore the influence of fees -- several pools keep the fees and only split the reward and nobody cares very much about it.

We're a LONG way from not having bounties on Block confirmations.  Next year some time, it will get cut in half (25 BTC), but assuming BTC haven't crashed back to the sub $0.05 level, that will still be enough to keep miners interested.  As BTC grows, the number of transactions will grow, as people start using it, they'll want their transactions confirmed quickly, so they'll include transactions fees.  As the number of transactions appearing in a single block grows (the transactions per second (tps)) the fees will increase.

If it all works out and BTC is successful, the transaction fees will FAR outweigh even the current 50 BTC bounty.  However, at that stage (2030?) there will only be professional miners, because the hashrate will be so high that casuals won't be able to compete.