Who will secure the network when there will be no more BTC to create???

[conspirosphere.tk]

just wondering, since mined BTC "serves as an incentive for the nodes to spend resources hashing the blocks and thus secure the network against double spending."

(the same problem may happen in case mining will become unprofitable)
Any idea? Is a system designed for self-destruction?

[DamienBlack]

Mining will be paid for by transaction fees. The transactions included in a block have their fees given to the miner. There have already been blocks with > 3 btc in fees. In the future, this could be much more.

I hate to be mean, but please do more research before posting questions. Do you really think that you discovered a flaw in the system overlooked by everyone else here when you understand so little about how things work?

[Deimos_Anomaly]

Will difficulty also go down to lowest possible (1?), or will it stay at a high power consuming difficulty?

[DamienBlack]

Will difficulty also go down to lowest possible (1?), or will it stay at a high power consuming difficulty?

It will always stay at a difficulty that makes it so that a block is made, on average, every 10 minutes. If the network is small, the difficulty goes down. If the network is big, the difficulty says high. A bigger network = more security. More money from transactions = a bigger network (as more people try to earn the transaction money).

[hawks5999]

Blocks will always be created. They may produce .00000001 BTC + fees but they will be produced.

[XIU]

Blocks will always be created. They may produce .00000001 BTC + fees but they will be produced.

Actually 0 BTC + fees

[evoorhees]

It is not hard to imagine that in 20 years or whatever when all the btc has been created, IF bitcoin is successful the number of transactions per second will be many. A block created at 10 min intervals will include literally tens of thousands of transactions, most or all will have a very small fee attached. At such a point, this fee would be much larger than the 50 btc currently generated from successful block discovery.

The fee itself will dwarf the new btc incentive long before this ever becomes an issue.

[XIU]

It is not hard to imagine that in 20 years or whatever when all the btc has been created, IF bitcoin is successful the number of transactions per second will be many. A block created at 10 min intervals will include literally tens of thousands of transactions, most or all will have a very small fee attached. At such a point, this fee would be much larger than the 50 btc currently generated from successful block discovery.

The fee itself will dwarf the new btc incentive long before this ever becomes an issue.

Exactly, in 2 years blocks will only give 25 BTC and even in 10 years the blocks will only give 12.5 BTC. So having all the transaction fees should give much more then the generation fee

[sadpandatech]

Since we got a few knowledgeable guys in here I'd like to pose a question(s) if you can enlighten me with an answer thats great, if not then I thank you any hows.

1. I assume once a block has recorded transactions attached to it that no more transactions can be added to that block?

2. Assuming thats the case is there a limit to how many transactions a new block can hold?

3. If there is a limit would it be possible for there to not be enough blocks generated fast enough to hold new transactions?

4. If there is not a limit are there any downsides to a block that got EXTREMELY bloated with transactions before it is able to be completed?


Thanks again in advance.

[XIU]

Since we got a few knowledgeable guys in here I'd like to pose a question(s) if you can enlighten me with an answer thats great, if not then I thank you any hows.

1. I assume once a block has recorded transactions attached to it that no more transactions can be added to that block?

2. Assuming thats the case is there a limit to how many transactions a new block can hold?

3. If there is a limit would it be possible for there to not be enough blocks generated fast enough to hold new transactions?

4. If there is not a limit are there any downsides to a block that got EXTREMELY bloated with transactions before it is able to be completed?


Thanks again in advance.

Block made = all transactions locked to it

The transactions count has a maximum of an uint64 which goes to 18,446,744,073,709,551,615; that is, hexadecimal 0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF. But the one making the block can always choose how many transactions that should be included.

[sadpandatech]

Thank you very much, Xiu.

  And, if the block creator decided to only accept so many transactions based on the number of them or data size and there a lot more transactions needing confirmation I assume the later ones will jsut have 0 confirmations until a block is generated that will include them?
 
  I am of course assuming end game BTC where all coins are out, there are a massive amount of transactions and the only folks mining are of a serious business mind who care about bandwidth and other considerations as much as the current cost to mine verse tx fees , etc.

[MtRev]

It might not be a bad thing if no one else mines but a few. The small few would just rake in more BTCs until the new generations adopts/accepts it. =]

[hawks5999]

The fee itself will dwarf the new btc incentive long before this ever becomes an issue.

I think about this a lot and think about the fee inflation. Won't that take away one of the advantages of btc over traditional banks/cc processors. I imagine in 25 years that for the BTC to be really viable 100 satoshi would be equiv to US$1.00. But if 1 satoshi is worth US$1.00 then the smallest possible fee is $1 which makes micro transactions unattractive. Just thinking about the endgame also.

[hawks5999]

I'm willing to bet that by that time, bitcoin code will have
been modified so that a BTC is further divisiblr. All that's
needed is to represent a BTC using a 128bit int instead of
a 64bit int like it currently is. And then we'll be good to
go for another 30 years.

This is in fact a relatively easy change to the code.

That sounds equivalent to FED printing to me... I'm sure it's accounted for but i feel like it's a conundrum in my mind.

[hawks5999]

Sorry, it's late so I'm suffering a little disclarity. But the way I see BitCoins, fully mined is 2,100,000,000,000,000 satoshi (that's 2.1 quadrillion or 21 million BTC x 100,000,000 satoshi. If you push the decimal out another, let's say, 8 decimal places, then you now have 210,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (that's 210 sextillion of the smallest unit) or 100,000,000 times more of that smallest unit. The location of the decimal is arbitrary in my mind. So maybe this is more of a deflationary event than equivalent to FED printing and I won't argue being wrong in claiming equivalency.
 

[conspirosphere.tk]

I hate to be mean, but please do more research before posting questions. Do you really think that you discovered a flaw in the system overlooked by everyone else here when you understand so little about how things work?

I do research even asking questions. It is easy and effective. I hope to never discover any flaw since I invested 20% of my speculative capital in BTC (at 19USD). I was just wondering about an incentives /economic aspect, not really technical.