If we accept nowadays that we will still be using BTC after all mining be done (21 M coins), as the miners will continue the blockchain by earning the transaction's fees, why dont we accept that we in fact dont need to mine theses coins at all?
We could stop at this present moment (@ ~12 M coins) and prevent spending all this energy and resources to mine virtual coins. Instead, miners could use the money of buying ASICs and stuff to invest in Bitcoins startups that solves real problems like security and education of use.
A "great" consequence of this would be that the BTCUSD price would go up since there would be far less offer of coins (~ theoretical double, 12M/21M).
I would like more experienced btcoiners to explain to me why this isnt good.
Regs
Lyhue
I couldn't find one good answer to this question so far, so I'll give it a shot.
Bitcoin mining was initially designed to distribute coins throughout the network. It's just a way of bootstrapping the currency. If Satoshi had all 21 million BTC from the outset, there would be nobody to transact with, no transaction fees, and no trust. Still, it may have been possible to have "premined" all of the coins and secure the network through fees, but this seems like a better method from the perspective of adoption.
There's a second, stronger reason though:
There is currently not a good (AFAIK) solution to establishing a market in transaction fees. Currently, if we removed the subsidy at the moment, since miners have no disincentive to include a transaction in a block, there is no floor on transaction fees. Since the difficulty can always fall, there will be a cycle in which the average tx fee falls lower and lower and the network is insecure.
If the second problem were soluble, it would be certainly be wise to save the resources and stop inflating. I doubt it would happen though because it would undermine faith in the currency.
