When is the last coin mined?

[Frost]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

[crazyearner]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

[vm_mpn]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

You mean 2140

[Frost]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

But does that not kill the whole deflation argument... or arguments like "Buy coins as long as you still can" that many people often use?

[pawel7777]

As the others mentioned, the last (fraction of) bitcoin will be mined ~2140

Check the schedule:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply

Note that block reward will become insignificant much sooner than that.

Around 2032 it will fall to below 1 btc/block (from 1.5625 to 0.78125).

And there will be no 21,000,000 but 20999999.9769  

[crazyearner]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

You mean 2140

yeah sorry my bad 2140 before the last coin will be mined and its been calculated a number of times on some sites that show it being a count down for total mined.

[rapsaodan84]

How much can it vary depending on technology? does the diff. change fast enough to make sure it will be year 2140?

[vm_mpn]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

You mean 2140

yeah sorry my bad 2140 before the last coin will be mined and its been calculated a number of times on some sites that show it being a count down for total mined.

Coinbase has nice chart here https://www.coinbase.com/charts (scroll down)... By mid-summer 2024 over 93% of bitcoins are going to be mined. There will be less than 7% left to mine over next 120+ 116 years.

[rapsaodan84]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

You mean 2140

yeah sorry my bad 2140 before the last coin will be mined and its been calculated a number of times on some sites that show it being a count down for total mined.

Coinbase has nice chart here https://www.coinbase.com/charts (scroll down)... By mid-summer 2024 over 93% of bitcoins are going to be mined. There will be less than 7% left to mine over next 120+ years.

I wonder if fees will be enough by then to keep the network secure.

[vm_mpn]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

You mean 2140

yeah sorry my bad 2140 before the last coin will be mined and its been calculated a number of times on some sites that show it being a count down for total mined.

Coinbase has nice chart here https://www.coinbase.com/charts (scroll down)... By mid-summer 2024 over 93% of bitcoins are going to be mined. There will be less than 7% left to mine over next 120+ years.

I wonder if fees will be enough by then to keep the network secure.

Most likely by that time fees are going to be mandatory, and Bitcoin will be much more valuable.

[rapsaodan84]

Question in the title. When is the last bitcoin mined?

Some time in the year 214 depending on technology if it manages to pass what it is now and gets coins minted a lot faster in shorter time but then again diff will just be compensated to make with the extra coins come out. SO its got a fair few years before the last coin will ever get generated.

You mean 2140

yeah sorry my bad 2140 before the last coin will be mined and its been calculated a number of times on some sites that show it being a count down for total mined.

Coinbase has nice chart here https://www.coinbase.com/charts (scroll down)... By mid-summer 2024 over 93% of bitcoins are going to be mined. There will be less than 7% left to mine over next 120+ years.

I wonder if fees will be enough by then to keep the network secure.

Most likely by that time fees are going to be mandatory, and Bitcoin will be much more valuable.

More than that I think we need to have more transactions so even with a small fee per transaction that's enough for miners.

[innocent93]

TX fee will be the only income of miners if all Bitcoin were mined? then how high the prices is need to make sure being miners is still profitable? I assume that price is much higher than today.

[rexxarofmoknathal]

Also, will the transaction fee remain at the standard 0.0001 BTC? (Was it even always like this back in the early days?) If so, that could become quite a sum to pay for a transaction. And is there a limit to how low the block reward can be? Because if there isn't wouldn't that mean that the cost of a transaction is greater than the reward per block?

[vm_mpn]

Also, will the transaction fee remain at the standard 0.0001 BTC? (Was it even always like this back in the early days?) If so, that could become quite a sum to pay for a transaction. And is there a limit to how low the block reward can be? Because if there isn't wouldn't that mean that the cost of a transaction is greater than the reward per block?

Yes, block rewards are halving roughly every 4 years...

2009 - 2012 | Block reward 50 BTC
2012 - 2016 | Block reward 25 BTC
2016 - 2020 | Block reward 12.5 BTC
2020 - 2024 | Block reward 6.25 BTC
2024 - 2028 |Block reward 3.125 BTC
2028 - 2032 | Block reward 1.56 BTC

etc... We do not know what kind of tech will exist in 10 years from now and what the minting cost is going to be so it's all speculation.

[Bizmark13]

Also, will the transaction fee remain at the standard 0.0001 BTC? (Was it even always like this back in the early days?) If so, that could become quite a sum to pay for a transaction. And is there a limit to how low the block reward can be? Because if there isn't wouldn't that mean that the cost of a transaction is greater than the reward per block?

You can send a transaction without paying a fee if you wanted to although it might take longer to confirm or not happen at all (and the coins will be returned to you). The default transaction fee used by the reference client was already lowered once in the past from 0.0005 BTC to 0.0001 BTC in May 2013 so it should be easy to change it in the event of a significant increase in BTC price:

0.8.2 Release notes

Fee Policy changes

The default fee for low-priority transactions is lowered from 0.0005 BTC (for each 1,000 bytes in the transaction; an average transaction is about 500 bytes) to 0.0001 BTC.

Link: http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=219504

EDIT: And the original default transaction fee was actually 0.001 BTC back when 1 BTC was worth cents.

[rexxarofmoknathal]

Ahh okay. So how will transactions work then, if there isn't any mining? Will it all take longer because there will be no more confirmations or will it work in a different manner?

[rapsaodan84]

TX fee will be the only income of miners if all Bitcoin were mined? then how high the prices is need to make sure being miners is still profitable? I assume that price is much higher than today.

The idea is that millions of people use BTC and pay a small fee per transaction. That way miners will receive enough coins.

[Bizmark13]

Ahh okay. So how will transactions work then, if there isn't any mining? Will it all take longer because there will be no more confirmations or will it work in a different manner?

There will be mining for as long as Bitcoin exists. New blocks will still be added to the blockchain every 10 minutes on average. The difference is that instead of mining for newly generated bitcoins, miners would be mining for transaction fees instead. Just like today, miners with more hashing power will solve more blocks and miners with less hashing power will solve less blocks. Today, the block reward consists of 25 newly generated bitcoins and the miner gets a few extra (e.g. 0.5 BTC) from transaction fees. In about a year or two from now, it will be 12.5 BTC plus transaction fees. Then a few more years later, it will be 6.25 BTC plus transaction fees and so on.

We don't know what the Bitcoin economy will look like two or three decades from now when the generation of new coins becomes insignificant due to continued block reward halvings or whether or not the model of mining for transaction fees is even viable at all although a few altcoins have tried to replicate the experiment. Premine (PMC) is/was one of them:

Premine, also known as PMC, is an alternate cryptocurrency that is defying normal convention in its method of mining and distribution. While some coins are mined, or earn you interest, Premine is exclusively redistributed by its users, and block rewards are generated only by network transaction fees...

...Premine is setting out to prove that cryptographic currency can continue long after the minting process has ended, making it not only a fascinating glimpse into the future of Bitcoin, but also a viable and stable alternative that thanks to its low total supply of less than 500,000 coins, allows each coin to store a great amount of wealth. This makes PMC an excellent alternative store of money. To say Premine is the future of Bitcoin isn’t far from the truth.

Will Bitcoin be able to survive once the minting of new coins has ended? Nobody knows. PMC started with a market cap of zero. Bitcoin currently has a market cap in excess of $8 Billion USD. Already suffering from volatile pricing, we may discover that Bitcoin might not survive this transition, and that no coin with such a high market cap ever could. In this sense Premine is also future-proof, having avoided this hazardous transition phase altogether.

Unfortunately, it failed:

So... How profitable was (is?) mining PMC for transaction fees anyway?

I've been semi-following this coin for a while and I know PMC was designed as an experiment to see what the future Bitcoin economy might look like once all coins have been fully mined and whether or not a community of miners can be supported solely through transaction fees alone so I'm interested to see how the experiment turned out now that it's coming to a close.

Well, I can tell you the result of that experiment. It turns out people are greedy bastards, and do not pay transaction fees unless they are forced to by the client. Even when PMC was quite popular, and worth quite a lot, it was impossible to get any profit from mining. Transactions with thousands of PMC didn't even have 0.1 PMC in fee.

I have been mining PMC from the start, and have been losing money on it from the start as well.

[rexxarofmoknathal]

Ahh okay. So how will transactions work then, if there isn't any mining? Will it all take longer because there will be no more confirmations or will it work in a different manner?

There will be mining for as long as Bitcoin exists. New blocks will still be added to the blockchain every 10 minutes on average. The difference is that instead of mining for newly generated bitcoins, miners would be mining for transaction fees instead. Just like today, miners with more hashing power will solve more blocks and miners with less hashing power will solve less blocks. Today, the block reward consists of 25 newly generated bitcoins and the miner gets a few extra (e.g. 0.5 BTC) from transaction fees. In about a year or two from now, it will be 12.5 BTC plus transaction fees. Then a few more years later, it will be 6.25 BTC plus transaction fees and so on.

We don't know what the Bitcoin economy will look like two or three decades from now when the generation of new coins becomes insignificant due to continued block reward halvings or whether or not the model of mining for transaction fees is even viable at all although a few altcoins have tried to replicate the experiment. Premine (PMC) is/was one of them:

Premine, also known as PMC, is an alternate cryptocurrency that is defying normal convention in its method of mining and distribution. While some coins are mined, or earn you interest, Premine is exclusively redistributed by its users, and block rewards are generated only by network transaction fees...

...Premine is setting out to prove that cryptographic currency can continue long after the minting process has ended, making it not only a fascinating glimpse into the future of Bitcoin, but also a viable and stable alternative that thanks to its low total supply of less than 500,000 coins, allows each coin to store a great amount of wealth. This makes PMC an excellent alternative store of money. To say Premine is the future of Bitcoin isn’t far from the truth.

Will Bitcoin be able to survive once the minting of new coins has ended? Nobody knows. PMC started with a market cap of zero. Bitcoin currently has a market cap in excess of $8 Billion USD. Already suffering from volatile pricing, we may discover that Bitcoin might not survive this transition, and that no coin with such a high market cap ever could. In this sense Premine is also future-proof, having avoided this hazardous transition phase altogether.

Unfortunately, it failed:

So... How profitable was (is?) mining PMC for transaction fees anyway?

I've been semi-following this coin for a while and I know PMC was designed as an experiment to see what the future Bitcoin economy might look like once all coins have been fully mined and whether or not a community of miners can be supported solely through transaction fees alone so I'm interested to see how the experiment turned out now that it's coming to a close.

Well, I can tell you the result of that experiment. It turns out people are greedy bastards, and do not pay transaction fees unless they are forced to by the client. Even when PMC was quite popular, and worth quite a lot, it was impossible to get any profit from mining. Transactions with thousands of PMC didn't even have 0.1 PMC in fee.

I have been mining PMC from the start, and have been losing money on it from the start as well.

So if the rewards for a miner is only the transaction fees (which we assume will be decreased further) then the price of bitcoin would have to be really high relative to today's in order for mining to be profitable? What sorts of price levels would we be talking about?

[Bizmark13]

So if the rewards for a miner is only the transaction fees (which we assume will be decreased further) then the price of bitcoin would have to be really high relative to today's in order for mining to be profitable? What sorts of price levels would we be talking about?

The default transaction fee can be adjusted as the value of BTC dips and rises. If the BTC price drops to $10, it could be made higher. If it skyrockets, it could be made lower. Furthermore, what we call the "default transaction fee" isn't really enforced on a protocol level. It's just the fee that is recommended by the reference client and you can choose to include a higher or lower fee with your transactions if that is what you prefer. Miners aren't tied to it either as they can choose to reject transactions with a fee less than x BTC where the value of x may or may not be the default transaction fee.

The price of a single bitcoin in terms of fiat shouldn't make a difference as to whether or not mining for transaction fees is profitable. If the BTC price is low, a miner might get 0.5 BTC (maybe worth $10) from fees. If the BTC price is high, the same miner might get 0.0005 BTC (still worth $10) instead.

Mining works in a way that if it's too unprofitable and too many people start leaving, then the difficulty will adjust so that mining becomes easier. If it's too profitable and too many people start entering, then the difficulty will adjust so that mining becomes harder.