The 2140 end of new bitcoins.

[franky1]

but the dates at which the block reward decreases to such a small amount of satoshi's per block to even be worthy of mining, will come sooner

Maybe not. You can buy more with the 25 reward today than you could with the 50 reward at the start.

ding ding ding we a have a winner. Glad a few people get it

definetly a winner hense the

alot of miners will think its time to end mining in 2029-2033 when the reward moves from just over 1.5btc to 0.7812500 per 10 minutes but thats because they are basing the profitability etc on todays value and hypertheticals

[1715077346]

1715077346

[1715077346]

1715077346

[1715077346]

1715077346

[1715077346]

1715077346

[bit777]

Why is this date so prevalent and so stuck in people's heads?

I don't care when the last satoshi will be mined. What really matters is this:

90% of all coins will be minted by 2023 (in ten years).
98% of all coins will be minted by 2033 (in twenty years).

In 2023 the annual inflation rate will be around 2-3%.
In 2033 the annual inflation rate will be less than 1%.

So in just 10-20 years the inflation will be so insignificant, newly minted coins won't make any difference on the market. If fiat money happen to survive for the next 20 years, miners won't be able to produce 10-20% price volatility due to selling BTC to pay for equipment.

Illustration by Matt Whitlock:

So what this potentially means that if bitcoins keep the newcomer demand high, and the supply falls, there will be a great rise in the bitcoin price on a daily basis.  And in just 10 years from now, 1 bitcoin could be worth 10k or more (a bit optimistic).

[oleganza]

So what this potentially means that if bitcoins keep the newcomer demand high, and the supply falls, there will be a great rise in the bitcoin price on a daily basis.  And in just 10 years from now, 1 bitcoin could be worth 10k or more (a bit optimistic).

If bitcoin demand grows, the price will grow. If it doesn't (market is saturated), then price stops growing.

With more than 50% coins already mined and quite low annual inflation (12% in 2013 comparing to 50% in 2011), supply does not affect prices much (in 2011 if you remember the price was slowly going down as miners were steadily selling their coins). Today demand is defining the price much more.

If we are doing optimistic estimation, it depends on the target market. If Bitcoin takes half of gold market as a distributed ledger of wealth, then its price has to be more than 10-20K USD. If it takes 10% of the global black market (estimated size is 1800 bln USD), its price must be around 8000 USD per BTC. Choose your market and figure how much BTC must be worth if it's used on X% of that market. If BTC replaces all currencies on global scale, each BTC would be much more than 1 million of today's dollars. I believe this can happen, but it may take a generation or two.

[Elanthius]

ets say based on todays difficulty. a number of ASICS far surpass the estimate of the last difficulty increase and so blocks are now found in 9 minutes or less.. the next change will push the difficulty to a 12 minute rate per block solution to ensure that the solving of blocks stay on their 4 year half life cycle.

Can anyone confirm if this is true? It sounds wrong.

[oleganza]

ets say based on todays difficulty. a number of ASICS far surpass the estimate of the last difficulty increase and so blocks are now found in 9 minutes or less.. the next change will push the difficulty to a 12 minute rate per block solution to ensure that the solving of blocks stay on their 4 year half life cycle.

Can anyone confirm if this is true? It sounds wrong.

It is wrong. Next difficulty is adjusted based on mean speed of the previous 2016 blocks. When hashpower monotonically grows, it means that blocks will still appear quicker than 10 minutes, but not that much quicker than before the adjustment.

Notice how difficulty is always behind the growing hashpower.



PS. Those who think 10 min interval is sacred and typical intervals of 8 minutes are "evil" do not understand anything and should go and re-read bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf multiple times. 10 min interval is a good enough approximation that makes miners waste less than 1% of CPU time while newly mined block is being propagated. 10 min is also good for sending blocks over partisan radio networks or to the satellite (or a google baloon). In itself, 10 or 8 minutes per block it does not matter at all. When the inflation rate drops to small numbers (<5%), it won't matter how fast blocks are actually appearing: every 10 minutes, 7 or 5.

[Mastergerund]

I also responded to that at the bottom of page 1. I think it got missed somehow.

I like the chart, though. It's a very good illustration of the points I was trying to make.

[franky1]

ets say based on todays difficulty. a number of ASICS far surpass the estimate of the last difficulty increase and so blocks are now found in 9 minutes or less.. the next change will push the difficulty to a 12 minute rate per block solution to ensure that the solving of blocks stay on their 4 year half life cycle.

Can anyone confirm if this is true? It sounds wrong.

my use of the 9 minutes -12 minutes were not to be taken literally. they were used to indicate that the difficulty would change to get an average time of 10 minutes per 4032 block.

hmmm..

my use of the amount 10 minutes and 4032 blocks is not to be taken literally, it is used to indicate that the difficulty over a average time evens out to ensure that the block solving stays on course for its 4 year cycle before the reward halving.

there is infact a slight variance on the number of seconds that has been mathemaically calculated into the bitcoin rules to make it not quite 10 minutes.

(hopefully this reply should quash the anal dwelling but monkeys that want to take things literally, instead of reading and putting into context)