WHAT HAPPENS WHEN THE LAST BITCOIN IS MINED?

[danielpjTTP]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

[rouhaud]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

they will still earn fees of transaction,
but yeah reward would be less,
it's like for a fork before it happend difficult to predict what will be the consequences.
we will see when the last one will be mined what miner will choose to do.

[Emoclaw]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

No, miners will be rewarded entirely from transaction fees which would be much higher per block due to bigger blocks (this was Satoshi's vision).
The price will also be EXPONENTIALLY higher than it is today, which means the effect of losing the block reward will be countered. This is already the case with every block reward halving, where the price is at least double when the block reward halves than it was at the previous halving.

This has been answered numerous times before, please search next time before making a new thread.

[serhishulak]

Mining will be done and all will be buying and selling BTC... ehm we will be only with out mining that is all

[luvbeening]

theoretically bitcoin would never end mining for that is why the halving for,it will just very close to a number 21,000,000 but will never reach that number

[karasuri]

theoretically bitcoin would never end mining for that is why the halving for,it will just very close to a number 21,000,000 but will never reach that number

theoretically BTC will end in next 20-30 years

[Hong Kong]

when the last Bitcoin has been mined, the last BTC will have been mined. it's a historic event. will I be here when it happens? i hope so !!! See you then my friends from all over our world

[hase0278]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

they will still earn fees of transaction,
but yeah reward would be less,
it's like for a fork before it happend difficult to predict what will be the consequences.
we will see when the last one will be mined what miner will choose to do.

Most probably when it is mined im sure many miners might start considering to quit mining because by that time many miners from now have gooten a lot of profit already with the help of their equipments. Either way maybe the rewards for mining at that time will still be big considering that the price will go up by that time to prices we can never imagine today. Therefore bitcoin wont crash at that point.

[Barcode_]

Even if there are no more block rewards for the miners, there would still be the transaction fees paid by the sender whenever a transaction is being send to the blockchain, so the miners would still continue to mine for bitcoins if there is profit after deducting all the mining equipment and electricity cost.

[trumper]

theoretically bitcoin would never end mining for that is why the halving for,it will just very close to a number 21,000,000 but will never reach that number

I think you are right, mining last bitcoin may be required very high hash power maybe bitcoin price deserves that hash power in the future.

[ArticMine]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

No, miners will be rewarded entirely from transaction fees which would be much higher per block due to bigger blocks (this was Satoshi's vision).
The price will also be EXPONENTIALLY higher than it is today, which means the effect of losing the block reward will be countered. This is already the case with every block reward halving, where the price is at least double when the block reward halves than it was at the previous halving.

This has been answered numerous times before, please search next time before making a new thread.

This is one of the "fee market" theories that has not been proven at all. It is just accepted without question. The fear of this is what has led to Bitcoin core developers to restrict the blocksize to 1MB in order to force the "fee market" to raise fees to eventually compensate for the missing block reward. The idea that one can increase fees by increasing the blocksize defies the most basic rules of economics. One does not increase price by increasing supply.

The most simple solution is to have a permanent block reward that does not fall to zero. This is what Monero has done with a minimum 0.6 XMR per 2 min block. For the Austrian hard money purists this is less than 1% per year and below the historical inflation rate of gold. Gold of course being the "gold standard" for hard money. With a minimum block reward then one can create an adaptive blocksize limit (Cryptonote / Monero) since a "fee market" is no longer necessary to secure the proof of work. One of the lessons from Monero is that this leads to a situation where the total fees collected per block is proportional to the block reward. If the block reward were to fall to zero then so will the total fees collected per block. Monero takes advantage of this to set fees! Now for the critical part. Any blocksize scaling solution that has a penalty that is equal to or lesser than in severity than the quadratic penalty for increasing the blocksize in Monero, in a coin with a finite number of coins.will lead over time to an insecure coin with the hashrate falling to zero. This would apply to Bitcoin, Litecoin,  Dash, Zcash etc but not to Monero or Dogecoin.

[thompshma]

Based on the halving frequency the last one will be in 2140 so I wouldn't worry too much about it.

[Pattberry]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

Right now every miner who helps in the creation of a block will be rewarded with 12.5 bitcoins as well as they will be getting the transaction charges too Hope you have heard about transaction fees too .In future since the block size has increased,we could transfer more coins per block which means more transaction fees and that is how the miners will survive.

[yugyug]

as predicted the last bitcoin will be mine in the  next 100 years maybe in between 2100-2140 depending on how advance is the computing power on that time but in my own vision on that generation most people are not interested anymore because there are so many alt coin that are much better and much profitable than bitcoin and beside the people who are joining the bitcoin today may no longer exist and the support of bitcoin technology is diminishing. even if the total supply of bitcoin is already mined the support of blockchain is going minimal for the last 100 years IMHO.

[jmigdlc99]

There will be no last bitcoin to be mined. Lol. The whales/devs will probably just make another fork/version of bitcoin and the maximum number of coins will simply be increased again. Too many people have invested big and the whales will surely do everything they can to earn more bitcoin/money.

[Hach]

I think no one of us will be there to know what's going to happen after more than 100 year.

[Wall-ET]

Okay, since miners get a reward (bitcoin) for mining and help support the block chain, what will happen when the last bitcoin is mined? What incentive is there to mine bitcoin and thus support the block chain? Won\’t bitcoin crash at that point?

No, miners will be rewarded entirely from transaction fees which would be much higher per block due to bigger blocks (this was Satoshi's vision).
The price will also be EXPONENTIALLY higher than it is today, which means the effect of losing the block reward will be countered. This is already the case with every block reward halving, where the price is at least double when the block reward halves than it was at the previous halving.

This has been answered numerous times before, please search next time before making a new thread.

This is one of the "fee market" theories that has not been proven at all. It is just accepted without question. The fear of this is what has led to Bitcoin core developers to restrict the blocksize to 1MB in order to force the "fee market" to raise fees to eventually compensate for the missing block reward. The idea that one can increase fees by increasing the blocksize defies the most basic rules of economics. One does not increase price by increasing supply.

The most simple solution is to have a permanent block reward that does not fall to zero. This is what Monero has done with a minimum 0.6 XMR per 2 min block. For the Austrian hard money purists this is less than 1% per year and below the historical inflation rate of gold. Gold of course being the "gold standard" for hard money. With a minimum block reward then one can create an adaptive blocksize limit (Cryptonote / Monero) since a "fee market" is no longer necessary to secure the proof of work. One of the lessons from Monero is that this leads to a situation where the total fees collected per block is proportional to the block reward. If the block reward were to fall to zero then so will the total fees collected per block. Monero takes advantage of this to set fees! Now for the critical part. Any blocksize scaling solution that has a penalty that is equal to or lesser than in severity than the quadratic penalty for increasing the blocksize in Monero, in a coin with a finite number of coins.will lead over time to an insecure coin with the hashrate falling to zero. This would apply to Bitcoin, Litecoin,  Dash, Zcash etc but not to Monero or Dogecoin.

Sorry but you have misunderstood the idea of fees and how the rewarding of the mining is done.
Once the block reward is 0 (near 2140) the fee will be forced (now it is forced just for the fact that if no fee your transaction may not get into the blockchain, as there are plenty of transaction that pay fees).
So when the block size is bigger there will be more transactions per block thus more fees in total will be collected.
So let's say today the normal fee for a fairly fast transaction is: 119435 satoshi, but one block can have only 1mb in this moment (average 2500 transactions, depends on size not number of transactions, so I took the day with most transactions 350k and devided it to see the average transactions per block for that day).
so 2500*0.00119435=2.985875BTC in fees.
If the size gets bigger, then much more transactions will get into one block => more money for miners.
example: BCH has 8x limit, so if by then BTC has made the size that bit (there must be consistent amount of transactions to force it to grow that much, but let's say it has happened)
then we will have 23.887 BTC reward...
And here is how increasing "supply" will increase profits.

Just like if you are fare service and you got only one bus with 10 seats, you will make less money then having 10 buses with 40 seats...

[11-BitNinja]

I was wondering the same thing when I heard that there was a finite amount of 'BitCoins' out there.

But I probably will be dead before all of them are mined, so it's a moot point at the moment.

[Portfolir Dev]

in 100 years time i suspect bitcoin will have evolved, how? I don't know but but if it is still around i'm sure it wont resemble what we know as bitcoin today.

[imteaz]

It might take years to mine all bitcoin, you never know caz day by day the difficulty increasing and its very hard to mine 1 btc now. So i think it will take long long time to mine all bitcoins, may be not in your life time .