What will happen once the mining stops?

[flyingwaffle]

Once the 21M BTC limit is reached and there is no more incentive for mining, isn't the number of active nodes necessary to sustain/validate the transactions suddenly drop and makes it way more easy for attackers to corrupt the system?

[lemonginger]

by then the plan is that transaction costs will provide enough reward for the miners

[Tulkas]

Is this going to cause a transaction cost increase? Is there any "built in" mechanism to regulate the transaction cost ?

[Cherothald]

Should this currency ever become really popular, then 0.01 BTC as a transfer fee would be way too expensive. As transfer fees are optional, anyway, you'd just have to modify the Bitcoin client to pay lower fees as default.

[bonker]

Hey what about pool miners? Do we get a cut of these transaction fees?

[Bert]

Well if individual pools do not change their payment system to include a high percentage of the transaction fees once the mining bonuses drop low enough then people will leave that pool. And go to a new, or old, pool that does give a high percentage. No miners equals no income equals change in policy, or die out. Some pool owners will have made enough by then to consider selling their pools. But only time will tell.

[luxgladius]

The 21 million is never actually really reached (well, not for a long long time). The distance to it just keeps halving. In another 1.5 years or so, half the coins will be found and the reward will drop by half. I think this step is going to actually be a huge problem for the network as many many rigs just become unprofitable and are taken offline. Therefore, the network hashrate, and thus response time, drops like a rock, and stays there for 6-8 weeks or so.

[Etlase2]

Just some numbers... with the current transaction fee of 0.0005, there would need to be 50,000 paying transactions every 10 minutes on average to equal the same amount of coins mined now--when the award halves at block 210k.

[Maxim Gladkov]

World's collapse will happen