Topic: What happens to mining as the block reward halves? (Read 1298 times)

That will happen definitely. But the bitcoin has risen quite a lot recently. So the shutdown could be delayed.

With the halving, a lot of in-efficient old miners will be shut down.  
But there is also a new wave of ASIC miners about to be released.
I'm not sure what this will do to the hashrates being produced/ difficulty. Someone who knows a lot about mining can predict much better what will happen during this halving.

Long term it still comes down to electricity price I think.   Unless we happen to have huge jumps with BTC keep coming with having coming.  And difficulty remains the same as far as added miners (which will not happen due to next gen miners being plugged in).   

I would agree the new gear allows decent electricity price to mine for much longer.  But electricity will still remain a big factor I think.

The equipment in terms of power consumption per GH is 2.5 times better than last gen. So I guess in terms of mining, the price and difficulty would have to subtract up to that to make it not profitable. The price seems to be going up, so I think mining even at a lower scale will still be ok.

The mining will go on, the difficulty will keep on rising due to the new more efficient miners. Some high cost miners will be shut down.

I think it's silly to expect folks to have definitive answers to your questions, when they largely involve human behavior. While all the math of crypto currencies is largely beyond me, there are several items surrounding Bitcoin that are completely driven by human behavior and expectations. The human element is most decidedly NON MATHEMATICAL in nature. For example:

- The price of BTC is a major contributor to everything that most folks do here. If the price rises, the supply increases, because folks are more willing to sell their BTC at $1000 than they are at $200. Don't just assume that BTC rewards are the primary "supply" of BTC. I have absolutely know idea what drives the demand for BTC. Right now I expect that demand is mostly a function of what folks expect for a future price.

- Some folks that are mining now, may well give up sometime after the halving because they can't afford to continue mining. That MIGHT drop the difficulty, though if they sell their equipment, nothing really changes.

- There is newer more efficient equipment likely to arrive within the next 60 days. That will shake things as well.

The lack of certainty you hear is that folks that are "knowledgeable"  already understand this and are unwilling to give you an answer that is more than speculation. Anyone that is "certain" is fooling you (and themselves).

Yes, I haven't found anyone yet among "the knowledgeable" who are willing to stick their necks out and issue a learned prediction on where things will stand in two months. 

And then after that, I suppose that we'll all be watching to see what happens in Spring 2017 when the core group will be able to finally sell off their huge BTC holdings, if they so choose?

It looks like an interesting 12 months...

By then  then the fees hopefully make it profitable through it.  But that is SO far off we cannot really speculate.   Even speculating what will happen at having is hard to do at this point.

I keep hoping to see a value bump in BTC but it's been a lot slower then I had hoped.  I don't see having as a big day on value jump as we know it's coming.  So I think it's more slower process.

Let's see...

in 2020, block reward halves from 12.5 to 6.25
in 2024, from 6.25 to 3.125
in 2028, from 3.125 to 1.5625
in 2032, from 1.5625 to 0.78125
in 2036, from 0.78125 to 0.390625
in 2040, from 0.390625 to 0.1953125
in 2044, from 0.1953125 to 0.09765625
in 2048, from 0.09765625 to 0.048828125
in 2052, from 0.048828125 to 0.0244140625
in 2056, from 0.0244140625 to 0.01220703125
in 2060, from 0.01220703125 to 0.006103515625
in 2064, from 0.006103515625 to 0.0030517578125
in 2068, from 0.0030517578125 to 0.00152587890625
in 2072, from 0.00152587890625 to 0.000762939453125
in 2076, from 0.000762939453125 to 0.0003814697265625
in 2080, from 0.0003814697265625 to 0.00019073486328125

I'm getting tired. You get the idea. In a nutshell, by 2032, the block reward becomes less than 0.8 bitcoins, but still amounts to about 112 bitcoins a day.

Block reward will reach zero in about 1000 years....

3 won't happen as 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 of 1/2 never goes to zero. It just gets smaller and approaches zero.

2. Don't know it can not be answered with a sure answer.

1. No as the correct answer is some miners will go,for a small.profit to zero profit or a loss. Some will be cut less then fifty percent
Some will be cut by more then fifty percent.

I make 2 assumptions to.answer #1 I kept the diff the same along with the price .

I could,do a long demo to,show many possible reductions in profits.

But a simple about  50% is not a good estimate. Because some miners are right on the border of no profit they should go to,a loss

1) Miner's earnings will be cut but not by 50%   The exact amount depends on how may miners are turned off.  As the difficulty falls the remaining miners each find more blocks.  Say a 10-30% fall in the hash rate and  a 20-40% fall in the income of the remaining miners.  The overall impact on Bitcoin is likely to be small
2) Who knows.   Don't forget miners also receive fees.
3) Ultimately miners will depend more on fees than the mining rewards.

With great respect, I have tried searching and cannot find a definitive answer.

Many sites/articles suggest that without a big increase in BTC value, mining profits will diminish so significantly that the network will have fewer miners doing less work, or that transaction fees will increase greatly.

Other articles suggest that miners will simply shift over and start mining other coins that are more profitable, leaving Bitcoin behind.

These are all simple questions that can be answered by the google machine in seconds. Try doing a lil research on it, the answers are not hard to find.

I have three questions related to the July block reward halving:


1.  Is it reasonable to suggest that miners' profits will be cut by about 50% with the halving?
2.  As rewards for processing blocks continues to decrease, will we reach a point where only one or two of the largest mining companies will be able to profit from mining?
3.  What happens when the block reward reaches zero?