In theory. Remember. In theory! Bitcoin price should increase enough for Mining to still be worth it even if Miners will be living on Fees only.
Oh really?
Feel free to drop on my topic:
Angry at the high fees? That's what everyone predicted the future will be like!At the high of the "spam" attack fees ere just half of the reward in value, how do you plan on making people pay twice as much as they did and still have thousands of users?
So sure in dollar terms reward will likely drop by half over the next 20 years, and even more when considering inflation. But over these 20 years mining will also continue to become more efficient, both in terms of efficiency of ASIC mining devices as well as the industry continuing to find cheaper and cheaper energy prices as the market naturally settles into the most efficient places to mine, including likely a large increase in cheap renewable resources used for mining. So while the reward will drop in real value, so will the cost of mining. Also tx fees will likely be 5-10x higher by then on average, thus helping to offset some of that decrease in reward value.
Completely irrelevant! People still make this mistake of thinking more efficient gear means automatically more security, guess what, it's not!
One machine being capable of mining at 300th/s and worth $10k doesn't mean the network was completely insecure when the whole hashrate was 10 th/s nor does it mean that with the new generation of twice more efficient machines as the S21 automatically the network is twice as secure as it was when S19 ruled.
What really matter is the cost of of a 51 attack:
So right now you need 2 million s21 $12K and 5KW machines to reach 600exa do it, at a cost of 24 billion
Let assume you have a ten times more efficient machine than the s21 and that everyone pays 1 cents per kwh but the reward is no longer $30 millions but $30k
That means miners will afford to spend 200k on energy each day, so 2000000 kwh, so that will be only 16 000 miners, generating 48 exahash.
And suddenly even while having a ten times more efficient machine and 1 cents energy, your network can be attacked with 192 millions instead of 24 billions, 125 times cheaper despite having only 12 times lower hashrate. So despite a 10 times more efficient machine the security has still gone done 125!? Why? Because it wasn't possible to offset the drop in reward even with completely unreasonable 1cents/kwh and a ROI that would take 50 years!