Bitcoin mining verifies transactions on the block chain. Eventually people might stop doing this once the mining reward becomes too small or once mining is over 100+ years from now.
Would advanced mining (quantum) solve this making only a few miners necessary to verify transactions?
What are your thoughts?
Your understanding of how bitcoin works is deeply flawed.
I suggest taking some time to learn a bit more before you start to panic about what is going to happen in the future.
Please explain us what's wrong with his question.
Thanks!
I'm not sure there is anything "right" with his question.
Bitcoin mining verifies transactions on the block chain.
This is not correct. Every peer on the network verifies every transaction and every block. All bitcoin "mining" does is "confirm" the transaction. More specifically, it determines a consensus on the order of transactions.
Eventually people might stop doing this once the mining reward becomes too small or once mining is over 100+ years from now.
The size of the mining reward is the sum of the block subsidy plus all of the transaction fees of all the transactions that are included in the block. When people talk about the "mining reward" becoming small, they are almost always concerned about the fact that the block subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. As such, they generally ignore (or are unaware of) two important facts.
- While the block subsidy might be smaller in terms of total numbers of bitcoins, success of bitcoin will almost certainly result in a larger value per unit. Therefore, if bitcoin is successful, then the smaller number of units in the future will carry larger value. If bitcoin is not successful, then it doesn't really matter whether any miners stick around to "confirm" transactions.
- The value of the sum of the transaction fees is expected to increase to eventually compensate the miners for the work they do. This is clearly specified in the original Bitcoin Whitepaper written by Satoshi Nakamoto. Anyone who is going to try to discuss how bitcoin works, and what the threats are to its future existence needs to have, at the bare minimum, read that document. Otherwise, they are almost certainly wasting their own time and the time of others with concerns (like this one) that have already been explained in this forum and on reddit thousands of times.
Would advanced mining (quantum) solve this making only a few miners necessary to verify transactions?
This is complete misunderstanding of what mining does and how it accomplishes it. There is nothing about quantum technology that would allow increased security with reduced participation in the proof-of-work process.
What are your thoughts?
As I've explained, my thoughts are that you need to take some time to learn a bit more about how bitcoin works before you panic about things you don't understand.
It's a bit like me going to an automobile engineering discussion forum and posting:
"I heard that automobiles use sparks to ignite the explosions that make the vehicle move. What if someday electricity becomes too expensive? Could we light the explosions with matches instead?"
