What happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins?

[Sephil]

This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.

Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.

What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?

[klarki]

This should definitely have a positive impact on the price.

[The One]

This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.

Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.

What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?

All coins are destroyed and bitcoin starts from the genesis block again.

[craZyLovE0916]

Then there will be no more Bitcoins. It is that simple. After we reach 21,000,000 there cannot be any more and only the value can go up over time (or down, of course).

[skyline247]

When we hit 21,000,000 Bitcoins people will stop mining as much because there will be no more reward excepts transaction fees.

[Kaller]

When we hit the maximum amount of BTC, then the value will go up a lot because no more can be created and demand will rise but supply will stay the same.

[tavr]

When we hit 21,000,000 Bitcoins people will stop mining as much because there will be no more reward excepts transaction fees.

I think by that time, when bitcoin reaches it limit, it could be some other useful currency or even a bunch of currencies or maybe there will be another useful method to make money as now it is mining

[HashFace]

For the miners, If bitcoin is still popular and there are a lot of transactions, it may still be worth mining just for the transaction fees.  

The incentive to mine will be greatly reduced over the coming years, each time the reward "halves", anyway.  What we may see is slow phase-out of the hashpower, rather than everyone continuing to mine like crazy until the last bit coin is had.

[knircky]

This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.

Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.

What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?

1. Ill be dead. And you will be too.

2. There wont be any empty blocks anymore.

[Jet Cash]

Well based on previous actions, there will be a hard fork, and the limit will be raised to 50 million. Blocksize will be increased so that people can include the lord's prayer in their transactions.

[odolvlobo]

The block reward consists of two things:

1. The subsidy, currently 1,250,000,000 satoshis (12.5 BTC).
2. The transaction fees.

The subsidy portion is cut is half every 210,000 blocks (approximately every 4 years). Eventually, it will go from 1 satoshi to 0 satoshis. You can read more here: https://wiki.bitcoin.com/w/Controlled_supply

Miners will still get transaction fees.

Note that the last bitcoin will take 30 years to mine (and the one before that will take almost 4 years), so there will probably not be any surge in price when the subsidy hits 0, as many believe.

[yoseph]

This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.

Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.

What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?

From the calculations due to the difficulty increasing whenever each bitcoin is mined, it will be another one hundred year or so before the last bitcoin is mined in the entire world, I don't think that even Satoshi will be around to witness the milestone, I am certain that by then the current generation would have moved on to another cryptocurrency then.

[Silberman]

This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.

Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.

What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?

First of all, we are not going to be alive for that moment since I have seen calculations that put that moment in the next century so that is very far away, but what it is going to happen is that as the block rewards gets smaller and smaller the miners will begin to depend a lot more on the fees of the users but as the price of bitcoin goes up with time then the miners will be able to cover their costs with less and less bitcoins.

[Gobeller]

This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.

Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.

What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?

We come to the end and this causes huge problems in the demand of bitcoin. The demand increases dramatically and we can't buy anymore bitcoin because the price increases too.

[lonelygrimm]

the game will end after that. If there is no more big events related with bitcoin, or just stay in there because there is no more supply price will be increase more, people will get less interest with bitcoin, maybe before that happens there is already a new choice from people to replace bitcoin.

[Maxre]

Definitely bitcoin will rise in value.
Because there is no more mined bitcoin but the demand for bitcoin much.
And possibly alt coins will also experience a significant increase.

[pepoaly007]

if that happend ther will be the end of the bitcoin there is no more bitcoin to get we will buy and sell that amount all we have only  

[Sephil]

Should've seen the "You'll be dead, what do you care?" coming.

I know it's difficult to speculate that far down the road (~2140) but it's worth thinking about the bigger picture. I'd have to agree with yoseph. We will probably move on to something different by then.

From the calculations due to the difficulty increasing whenever each bitcoin is mined, it will be another one hundred year or so before the last bitcoin is mined in the entire world, I don't think that even Satoshi will be around to witness the milestone, I am certain that by then the current generation would have moved on to another cryptocurrency then.

Or maybe with the commercial release of qubit processors we won't need to have warehouses of ASICs running all day and mining will be done in the palm of our hand. Maybe a bit idealistic but we are talking over 100 years in the future.

Then you run into the issues with private key security. Hopefully encryption scales proportionately to hardware advances.

[DoublerHunter]

If bitcoin will be mined all of them then the miners will be just getting profits from confirming the different transactions because the miners are the only one who can validate transactions and they can still get profit via bitcoin by doing that. Miners will never leave bitcoin because the fees from transactions is the key to stay in profitable business.

[revswim93]

Bitcoin price will go sky high, miners will start getting paid from transaction fees alone, bitcoin will become deflationary. Anonymous voting on the blockchain, global utopia, nano-robots fulfilling our every desire. Then immortality, breaking the boundaries of all form and limitation, the nanobots infecting the rest of reality and ultimately creating new multiverses. And all you have to do is hold.