Topic: what will happen after 21 million bitcoins are mined? (in layman's terms) (Read 504 times)

The overall number of Bitcoin will then be fixed, omitting any that have been lost in real time or whose private keys cannot be recovered, and the miner will only be rewarded with transaction fees. There are millions of souls on earth now, and this 21 million Bitcoin, which is highly divisible into Sats, will be more than enough to go around.

Maybe. 20 years ago most people wouldn't have had an always on device in their pocket, let alone an always on device with constant internet access. Think of all the new always on and always connected devices people have now, from phones to smart fridges to Amazon Echos to video doorbells. Is a node that big a leap? And even if it is, then people can still use mobile Lightning wallets which will use a third party back end and let the end user use Lightning extremely easily.

Having no new coins entering circulation will just make it even more obvious what absolute nonsense taint is, since every coin will have enough history to be able to be classed as tainted by almost any metric.

I guess no one will think about setting up miners to earn 1 satoshi (divided to all the miners in a pool!), but the fees, which are now at about 1-5 BTC per block.

I don't think many altcoins will have survived until 2140.

Maybe Monero...

It was the same back in the 80s with internetworking protocols. TCP/IP was the dark horse. IPX looked promising, but where is it now?

IPv4 looks "ancient" and "spartan" compared to IPv6 (paltry adoption), but network effect (aka Metcalfe's law) is what matters the most, not being feature-rich.

We also don't know how humanity will be by then. How big the population will be (100+ years is a lot, we could have WW4 by then!), what kind of technology we will employ (a Dyson sphere could let us bump difficulty up to 192 digits).

I also don't believe that BTC's price/valuation (or more correctly: purchasing power) will ever stabilize to a straight line.

Every 4 years (until 2140) we will see a price increase, but with ever diminishing returns in every new cycle. Hyperbitcoinization (due to hyperinflation) might play out differently (constant parabolic/geometric growth).

Even in a potential BTC standard, I expect commodities such as oil and wheat to require less sats every 4 years, since BTC is deflationary.

Very true that bitcoin price will skyrocket because it is only the individuals that will determine the demand and supply of bitcoin. The fundamentals will not have very much effects on bitcoin anymore.
But there are people who thinks that it is when bitcoin price will stablize to an extent, I.e when all bitcoin is mined. I do not so much believe in this school of thought.

But I have this thought that when miners are not expecting any other bitcoin from solving blocks, and bitcoin prices goes so high, people will shift from bitcoin to some good altcoins.

Well I think you have an idea what happens when all the 21 million Bitcoin completely enters circulation, there is no complications to it.
Satoshi Bitcoin creator made only 21 million bitcoin and although the aren't all mined but that's the maximum amount that can possibly be mined, once this happens now, all available would be in circulation and then would be controlled by the market, the demand of bitcoin then should surpass that of the supply so by my calculations I think when all possible bitcoin would have been mined we would see serious Bitcoin price rise.

Just thinking about what will be the price of BTC by then. 1 satoshi for 4 years is insanely low if the price of BTC hasn't reached an insane figure of numbers. I won't be there by that time but I am happy with what I have right now and felt lucky to see the raise of giants which will change the economy of our society for the next hundreds of years.

I also have a question about what will happen after 21mln. bitcoins mined, but a specific one.

2140 year. Imagine the last bitcoin has been mined. From now on, it is impossible to get a new BTC, which means that all bitcoins that will exist at that time (to which there is access) will already have a history on the blockchain. That is, it will not be possible to get a "clean" btc and all will have owners in the past (most likely different), except for those that have not moved (but have access to them). Over the years, each bitcoin will go a long way and change not hundreds and thousands of its owners, so it will not be possible to say who owns it now. Will bitcoin be able to become more anonymous in future years (provided that the privacy of the owners is respected at every stage)? What are your thoughts on this situation in general?

The number of repetitions of questions around this is due to the increasing number of beginners who want to know about bitcoin.
because I was almost going to ask the same thing on the google search engine. but I have seen the answer in this forum. so I undo my intention to search on the google search engine.

and the number of searches related to this question is incredible. this is a sign that many are interested in bitcoin.

BTC will be worth the equivalent of billions of USD by then (2140+), so fees alone will be fine.

I'm pretty sure the average Joe won't hold custody of their funds, and that's neither good neither bad. It's neutral. Over all, it's good that we have the option to opt-in to self-custody. If some don't value it, I'm definitely not going to convince them be responsible. Nor should I; some are just irresponsible, and trust a third-party more than they trust themselves. Even that way, they can use Lightning hubs and be part of the Lightning Network without holding custody.

Holding keys and signing transactions in the background versus leaving an entire computer running 24/7 to enforce consensus rules and check for cheating attempts is not of the same order of magnitude. I don't bet the average Joe will do the latter. Hell, lots don't even do the former.

what is certain is that if there are more and more users or those who invest in bitcoin, then the price will likely shoot up, because for example the supply has been mined, surely all bitcoins will be held by the person who bought it, while the more users invest, the bitcoin price will continue to rise. .

There is a limit to how much tx data can be included in a single block, so mass adoption without a change in block size, would not make much of a difference.

Much of the question about how Bitcoin would respond to end of block rewards would only be answerable in the coming years; any thing else is just speculation.

They need to be enough to make mining/processing the transaction worth it. Although, when you compare it to other methods of transferring money, it works out similar. Since, most banks charge for international payments to be processed, and that can actually be much more expensive even compared to when Bitcoin's network was at it's most bloated, and therefore most expensive.

Plus, I envision that fees will be improved upon even further. Obviously a lot of users talk about Lightening, and segwit. These will either be improved further or new implementations will be made with the ultimate goal of making it worthwhile for everyone. Therefore, decent fees, and decent reward. 

Tx fees don`t necessarily need to go up if the total number of tx goes significantly up i.e. mass adoption.

No more block rewards but there would still be transaction fees.  However, doesn't seem this would make up for block rewards no longer being a thing.  Appears there would be an increase in TX fees, but the question is will they be reasonable or unbearable?

There are many in current case also whom we can say average Joe who doesn't know how the transactions take place in the backend but only know they can transfer money from one address to another as understanding technical part related to keys and UTXO is not an easy task.

And yes in the future wallet integrated softwares will be there as technical part is being advanced where code is also transformed into human readable format also so they will handle operating LN channel also for the ease of users and this is just testing phase where layer 2 protocols are being implemented and we may see another BIP that focus more on these matters in the coming years.

There will be wallet software which does all this for you in the background. Just as the average Joe doesn't need to know how to actually create or sign a transaction, or how to use change addresses, or how their private keys are derived, they also don't need to know how to actually open and close a Lightning channel. Their wallet will handle all this for them, and they will just spend freely and receive freely to the same channel without being aware of what is going on in the background.

That's most likely the case where a miner can earn. When all the Bitcoins are mined then miners will no longer mine new coins and they will only earn from transaction fees. I don't know if miners would still be profitable in some part of countries where their electricity bill is not cheap or doesn't have an alternative way to have electricity at low cost. Well, other people do use much higher sats/byte in their transaction even though they amount they transact is not much.

This is exactly the moment where the whole global adoption thing goes south or both or east, whatever is the bad direction where you are 
The moment the average Joe has to do this and that and look at that and this and be sure to balance a lot of things he normally doesn't give a damn about it's the moment the average Joe will say fy this shit ain't for me!

You can't talk about mass adoption when you start by throwing 100 things of what to do and 1000 things not to do at the average citizen who has problems moving his google account on a phone, it all sounds pretty nice and understandable for some who spend hours each day talking about bitcoin but not so much for the rest of the world from which this adoption should come, and the difference when things start to pile up, that you can see even here. Look at LN topics and you will see a lot of users that have not made even the step of installing a client that supports it, the more complicated it gets the less enthusiasm will be about it.

This aside, we're going back to the same problem, nobody gets paid inside the LN so people must constantly open and close channels and so there is less activity and because there is less activity nobody wants to receive their wage there. Replace LN with straight-up Bitcoin and surprise, the same problem we have now!!!!!