About the time after all coins have been mined

[42246709215]

I wonder what will happen when all Bitcoins have been mined.

If people get no more Bitcoins for mining why should they do it ?

And if just a few people mine, it will be easy to exceed the mining power to 51%+ ...

??

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[azeteki]

The block subsidy does not reach zero until around the year 2140. I'm sure you can think of more pressing concerns.

The block subsidy reaches 0.2BTC around the year ~2040. Still over two decades out.
Technological advancements could potentially render Bitcoin obsolete over that time frame if it is not changed in some way.

In addition to the block subsidy, transaction fees provide incentive.
Today they make up on average ~0.1BTC or ~60USD per block.
This could decrease or increase in the future. It really depends on how the blockchain is ultimately used.

You should concern yourself more with decreases, rather than fixate on 'going to zero'.
It's a bit silly; I think it is reasonable to assume that 2140 was chosen as a date so late as to be irrelevant.

[DannyHamilton]

I wonder what will happen when all Bitcoins have been mined.

If people get no more Bitcoins for mining why should they do it ?

And if just a few people mine, it will be easy to exceed the mining power to 51%+ ...

??

As azeteki has pointed out, your question doesn't make any sense.  It has been asked and answered hundreds of times here at bitcointalk as well as on reddit, YouTube, and many other internet sources.  With about 3 seconds of Google search engine use (or whatever your favorite search engine is), you could have found the answer and avoided making such a silly statement.

[TNBS]

I do not believe one can accurately calculate and/or estimate when all Bitcoins will be mined. There are many factors such as mining profitability, technological advancements in mining speed, the demand for Bitcoins, collapses of certain global economies, and countless other variables. What we do know is that the last block containing new bitcoin will be the block 6,930,000 ; we are currently on block 312,450 (at the time of this posting). The estimation given is based off block speeds being under 10 minutes per block. With even the slightest change in speed, the date could be prolonged. If calculating the average block speed at 15 minutes, it would be late 2202. Keep in mind when trying to estimate what the average block speed is, todays speed is only a small window in time. With increasing difficulty, the future could hold hour long block times if our technology does not increase. Alternatively if one were to develop an unthinkable mining rig with speeds unimaginable, they could quickly be pumping out blocks every few seconds.

Overall, to answer your question; We will never know when the last bitcoin will be mined until it happens.

If you are concerned as to what would happen once the last coin is mined, all the transaction fees would go to the pool that finds the block. The transaction fees would be divided up and serve as *hopefully* a substantial reward.

[Quokka]

I do not believe one can accurately calculate and/or estimate when all Bitcoins will be mined. There are many factors such as mining profitability, technological advancements in mining speed, the demand for Bitcoins, collapses of certain global economies, and countless other variables. What we do know is that the last block containing new bitcoin will be the block 6,930,000 ; we are currently on block 312,450 (at the time of this posting). The estimation given is based off block speeds being under 10 minutes per block. With even the slightest change in speed, the date could be prolonged. If calculating the average block speed at 15 minutes, it would be late 2202. Keep in mind when trying to estimate what the average block speed is, todays speed is only a small window in time. With increasing difficulty, the future could hold hour long block times if our technology does not increase. Alternatively if one were to develop an unthinkable mining rig with speeds unimaginable, they could quickly be pumping out blocks every few seconds.

Overall, to answer your question; We will never know when the last bitcoin will be mined until it happens.

If you are concerned as to what would happen once the last coin is mined, all the transaction fees would go to the pool that finds the block. The transaction fees would be divided up and serve as *hopefully* a substantial reward.

Difficulty doesn't increase linearly, it changes based on hash rate. Difficulty recalculates with the intention of keeping mining speed at (Or as close as predictably possible to) 10 minutes per block. So increasing hash rate would only cause blocks to be mined faster than 10 minutes until the difficulty retargets. And the same can be said about a decrease in hash rate.

[DannyHamilton]

I do not believe one can accurately calculate and/or estimate when all Bitcoins will be mined.

Depending on what you mean by "accurately", you are most likely incorrrect.  All bitcoins will be mined somewhere areound the year 2140.

There are many factors such as mining profitability, technological advancements in mining speed, the demand for Bitcoins, collapses of certain global economies, and countless other variables.

And yet, unless there is a significant disruption in the process, the Bitcoin protocol self adjusts the difficulty so that new blocks are created on average every 10 minutes, and the block subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks.  Therefore, regardless of any of those things you've mentioned, the block subsidy will be cut in half approximately every 4 years, and all bitcoins will be mined somewhere around the year 2140.

What we do know is that the last block containing new bitcoin will be the block 6,930,000 ; we are currently on block 312,450 (at the time of this posting). The estimation given is based off block speeds being under 10 minutes per block. With even the slightest change in speed, the date could be prolonged. If calculating the average block speed at 15 minutes, it would be late 2202.

Fortunately the protocol self adjusts the difficulty, so an average speed of 15 minutes over a large number of blocks is unlikely.

Keep in mind when trying to estimate what the average block speed is, todays speed is only a small window in time. With increasing difficulty, the future could hold hour long block times if our technology does not increase.

If the average time between blocks approaches an hour, then the protocol will reduce the difficulty, and block times will return to 10 minutes.

Alternatively if one were to develop an unthinkable mining rig with speeds unimaginable, they could quickly be pumping out blocks every few seconds.

But only for the next 2016 blocks, after which the difficulty will jump to 400% higher than it currently is.  It will continue to increase the difficulty by 400% every 2016 blocks until the block times return to 10 minutes.

Overall, to answer your question; We will never know when the last bitcoin will be mined until it happens.

But by understanding the protocol, we can come up with a pretty reasonable estimate of somwhere around the year 2140.

If you are concerned as to what would happen once the last coin is mined, all the transaction fees would go to the pool that finds the block. The transaction fees would be divided up and serve as *hopefully* a substantial reward.

Correct.

[TNBS]

This is true, however the adjustment period it is still vulnerable to manipulation. If I spent 100 million USD on research and development of mining equipment, and I was in sole control and custody of the machine. I could easily disrupt the mining process by mining blocks selectively. Lets say I crash the party and start up my miner at the beginning of the block, I could easily find it within (for the sake of the argument) say 10 seconds. The difficulty would change tremendously in order to account for this increase of mining speed. Then lets say I turned off my miner, the other mining equipment could take a while before finding a block at the adjusted rate. Essentially nothing is finite in the blockchain system, no matter how much everyone thinks it is. You can argue the date on when the last bitcoin will be mined, but given that this is the first of its kind my guess is still; the date is unknown.

[DannyHamilton]

Lets say I crash the party and start up my miner at the beginning of the block, I could easily find it within (for the sake of the argument) say 10 seconds. The difficulty would change tremendously in order to account for this increase of mining speed. Then lets say I turned off my miner, the other mining equipment could take a while before finding a block at the adjusted rate.

Solving just 1 block quickly would have minimal effect on the difficulty adjustment.  The difficulty is calculated based on the average rate of blocks over a set of 2016 blocks.  If you only solved 1 block quickly (shall we say instantly?), and the other 2015 of them were solved at the 10 minute average, then the average rate over 2016 blocks would be 599.70 seconds per block (or 9.995 minutes per block).

At worst, you could spend significant amounts of electricity to mine all 2016 blocks as fast as possible.  This would result in the difficulty increasing at the maximum of 400% after 2016 blocks.  If you then shut off your equipment, the next 2016 blocks would come at an approximate rate of 1 block every 40 minutes (assuming that nobody else is adding more hash power to the network in the meantime).

Essentially nothing is finite in the blockchain system, no matter how much everyone thinks it is.

Nothing is finite?  You are saying that bitcoin is somehow intrinsically infinite in every way?  I don't undertand that statement.  It doesn't seem to make any sense.

You can argue the date on when the last bitcoin will be mined, but given that this is the first of its kind my guess is still; the date is unknown.

You are correct, the exact date is unknown.  However, it can be reasonably estimated to be somewhere around the year 2140.

[TNBS]

I by no means am trying to say the total bitcoins mined is not finite, I am trying to say how we get there is not set in stone. At the rapid growth Bitcoin is offering, I would be surprised if it didn't get snatched up by some corporation trying to manipulate the system. We dont even know if we will have enough food supply 100 years from now, who knows if we will have the electricity, internet, or bitcoin around then.