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!!!!!

You are really not using LN optimally if you are opening a channel and making a series of one-way transactions. The optimal way to use LN is to open a channel with some value of coin on your side of the channel, to spend some money via various transactions (perhaps "everyday" transactions such as buying coffee), *and* receiving coin via payments for things such as your salary and/or goods/services. So you may open a channel with enough money to pay for 20 coffees, but are able, over a period of time, to buy hundreds of cups of coffee because you continuously receive (a portion of) your salary to the channel.

So someone opening a LN channel can reasonably pay a high fee compared to the size of the channel, if they are confident their counterparty will not give them a reason to close the channel quickly. This will allow miners to receive a larger amount of coin on a per-block basis, even if the maximum block size is not increased.

Oh my bad Im not a mining guru so i thought it can be possible . But even its mined out all supplied its their choice what to do on those equipment, maybe continue using it on bitcoin for the transactions fee. Probably there are ways how to remedy those unused equipment if that event happened. Prices will definitely go down due to this, but continuing the processing of transaction could increase their fees even without block reward for mining. Im just assuming that they could shift to other coins for the sake of mining.

Bruh, 5 years around here and you still think a sha256 ASIC could just mine scrypt just like that? ASICs are not GPUs, if you can't mine bitcoin or the two lame shitcoins cash and sv then there is nothing left to mine with them, recycling is the only thing they are good for! Look what happened after ETh went POS, all those video cards are almost losing money while mining, the same will happen here, instead of 7 cents per th/s a day you will be making 0.07 cents! as in $0.0007.

Miners adventures on bitcoin will come to an end. But their equipments will not be wasted since they can use it to mine other supplied last coins like dogecoin and others. The value of bitcoin will depend on demand, imagine there would be no bitcoin to circulate coming from them, imagine the action price or effect of it in the long run. It will also be good I guess.

When the price was 60k, a s19 was 10k , a cool 100$ per TH/s, right now you can buy the pro for 19$/Th/s with next day delivery.
Back in April, you couldn't attack the network because there was no gear to buy, right now you have tons of both older gear that is not feasible to mine with and tons of new gear that isn't being bought and tons of orders getting canceled so you have that one click away.

So it's not about how big the hashrate is, it's about how much it will cost an attacker to take over it, no entity is really feeling threatened by a system with the marketcap the size of Nvidia and with 200k daily transactions, when it reaches 10x times that, do you think $20millions a day will be enough to repel an attack?


It's all good on paper, and of course, almost everyone here (except for franky1) would use it, but you think the average Joe who is angry at banks for taking him 1$ a month for card maintenance will be the one opening and closing channels like that? Make it ten cents and then we talk  


Of course, we need more adoption, we need more spending we need usage, not fancy bitcoin towns, laser eyes, and Vulcano bonds, but all those memes about holding two satoshi cause in 20 years you're going to buy an island with it are definitely hurting actual usage.
Fortunately enough there is an almost certain failed experiment happening right now with ETH and I'm pretty sure in a few years we will have plenty to learn from what happens when people just store money in order to get more money out of thin air without doing a thing.

Hence my comment about multi-user channels. If you could open a channel which includes 20 users, they can all pay $2 which is fine for the user, but the miner earns $40 for that channel being opened.

I don't think we necessarily need the same security as we have now. Bitcoin's hashrate has been on a more-or-less steady upward climb since day 1. It wasn't 51% attacked when the price was 3x what it is now with half the current hashrate, and it wasn't 51% attacked when the price was the same is it now but with double the block subsidy and only a tiny 5% of the current hashrate. It's about making sure the fees ensure the network is secure enough, not that the hashrate continues to increase forever more.

Then we need more adoption and more use as a currency!

Most probably the fees will rise as they will not remain static as we are 601 days left from the next halving at block 840,000 when the rewards will be halfed to 3.125BTC per block and coins in circulation will also reduce but the transaction would increase I would say even if we take into consideration the layer 2 like LN channels and you would pay more to confirm your transactions even if we say in the short span also so the miners profitability is still there.

Yeah in the meantime we may see some more development to tackle the fees issues in much more efficient manner but we are seeing the LN capacity being increased each time and they are being used by many to make regular transactions saving them from fees and LN nodes support being rise with bitcoin block space limitations.

If that's the case then it's pretty much efficient for miners to have that much amount in fees only as an extra reward along with bitcoin earned so we can say that they will have around $250k as block reward plus $100k-$160k in fees as well so securing the network would still be profitable fort them and we will see more support from the users as well.

It's just a hypothesis and would not be fully put to the test until a while in the future. The perspective of LN taking many of the transactions off chain and only needing to open or close channels on chain, increasing the fees of such individual transactions. The downside is such a situation would practically force everyone to go for off chain means of transacting as, no one would spend ridiculous amount on a single transaction.

If you pay 2$ for opening a channel and we balance the block perfectly and we forget about closing the channel completely you will still only be able to cram in only $8000 worth of fees, so yeah, for you it will definitely work but the miners will have to deal with a reward of just $8000.

From a miner's point of view, sat/b doesn't matter, what matter is the pot, if bitcoin reaches 100k or 1 million I don't see users suddenly paying 10x times more just because of that, the overall fees that people are willing to pay must be enough to compensate for the diminishing reward, and there is no way to force them to pay that much if they don't want.

Two different things, how much is one user willing to pay on tx, and how much is required in fees to keep at least the same level of security as now!


More concerning it that we're nowhere near having full blocks actually as on-chain transactions are going down rather than up for the last few years.

Not sure where you are getting this number from? Even if we say that bitcoin goes to $1 million, and you can open a Lightning channel in a transaction of a few hundred vbytes in size, then with a fee rate of 1 sat/vbyte you are looking at $2-3 to open a channel. Even if we go up an entire order of magnitude say it's going to cost you $30 to open a channel, if I then use that channel to make a few hundred transactions over a period of months, then it is overall it is still cheaper than had I made all the transactions individually.

You can always rebalance channels, and there are new developments such as channel factories and Eltoo which allow multi-user channels. With enough global adoption of bitcoin, there will be enough volume on the base layer simply from opening and closing Lightning channels (or some other layer two mechanism) to maintain the security of the network.

It may be that a further block size increase is needed in the future, but we are nowhere near that stage yet.

Before thinking of the price that would be required, think of the first part mentioned, transactions cost would have to be ~$125k, if we take the last full block, 754925 has 1,492 transactions, so that would be around 83$ per tx, who do you think is going to pay that amount? People who move millions, yea, but nobody is going to pay even a $500 yearly subscription at these levels.

It's the opposite way, it's not like fees will have! to compensate for the reward, it will be how much people will want to pay in fees and from this, we will find out how much of the block reward will be replaced by those fees.  For a brief period in 2021 the average fee went to 60 with the network clogged completely, this won't last for more than a month simply nobody is going to pay those forevers, there won't be any constant pressure to pay that much, they will simply abandon transacting alltoghehter.


But you will still need to pay on average 1$ for each coffee purchase to conitribute enough to the network.
So you either lock in 1000 coffee purchases or we, hmm, how do I say this, we increase the number of possible transactions in a block, by increasing something... something.. not width, not length, but , maybe size? 

OP you said, you have asked this question many times, and you create this thread on September 17, 2022, 08:00:54 AM and the account was opened on September 17, 2022, 07:46:34 AM that means indirectly, this your alt-acct. By the way this not the first this kind thread has been created and different answers have been given to the question. In my own way of answering the questions is that the 21m BTC can not be exhausted because it is circulating everyday that is, transaction is moving around 24hrs. If you are not selling, another person is selling and if you are not buying another person is buying so the circulation of bitcoin is 24 hours. And nobody can buy and keep bitcoin in his wallet for years. You must buy something so exchange is always there. And another thing again. As far as people are mining bitcoin, it will never exhausted. And people must mine. One thing people need to understand is that bitcoin is not a goods that you pay but it is an asset.

Miner will just get compensated with transaction fee and the total amount of Bitcoin will then become fixed excluding those that has been lost in real time, those whose private keys can't be retrieved. This 21million Bitcoin which is highly divisible into sats and will be so much enough to meet the millions of souls in exsistence

Agree with the first sentence, but not as far as the last coinbase reward. For the last 10 halvings (or ~40 years), the block subsidy will be under 1000 sats. For 1000 sats to even be worth $100, then a single bitcoin would have to be worth $10 million. The coinbase reward will be irrelevant in the grander scheme of things long before the last coinbase reward.

Not necessarily. Lightning is currently both more private and more censorship resistant (against the likes of centralized exchanges and wallets enforcing taint and blacklists) than the base layer.

Which is fine. If I'm paying for a coffee, there is no need for me to use the base layer, and Lightning brings advantages in terms of both speed and fees.

No one is able to predict what will happen next year, let alone time frames like decades or centuries. So, no one knows, and no one can tell you if bitcoin will even exist after miners stop getting paid via freshly-mined bitcoins. Staunch bitcoiners like myself expect that transaction fees will be enough to incentivize miners to continue providing security to the network, but for that, the price of bitcoin in fiat terms needs to go up considerably so that transactions fees would also be a sufficient amount to replace bitcoin block subsidy. However, the problem with high transaction fees (in fiat terms, not in bitcoin units terms) is that the base layer will become almost unusable for people wanting to transfer tiny sums, forcing them to switch to something more economically reliable, for example, sidechains, layer 2 solutions like Lightning Network or even alternative blockchains. So, in the future people will conduct most, if not all, of their transactions outside the base layer (the Bitcoin blockchain), which naturally will result in such undesirable outcomes as a decrease in security, privacy, censorship-resistance, and decentralization. The Bitcoin network will remain robust and decentralized and will be used for settlements of large transactions, but these transactions will no longer be a representation of individuals exchanging with other individuals.

That's just a little less than the last ATH, so it's definitely a feasible amount per Bitcoin. There would also still be a percentage coming from block rewards, at least for the next 30-90 years. And the significance of that could get much higher with increasing value. Maybe even to the last coinbase reward being claimed.

I've always had the perspective that the rewards to mining requirements ratio, is a system that can regulate itself, especially as there are so many years between now and the finite supply and many gradual decrements between now and then.

The change will be that all mining revenue will come from transaction fees, as opposed to a percentage of revenue under the status quo. As oeleo discusses above, it is likely that the majority of mining revenue will come from transaction fees in the next several halvings, and nearly all revenue will come from fees well before the block subsidy goes to zero.

I suspect that transaction fees on a per block basis will likely rise over time (up until a point at which the market will no longer support higher tx fees) as adoption of bitcoin increases. The specific timing when transaction fees will make up the majority of revenue can be debated, but I think most would agree that this will happen sometime in the next few decades.

This is based on the assumption that total fees per block will remain static, which as I mentioned above, I don't think they necessarily will.

We already know that block space is too limited as it stands to scale bitcoin to global usage, which is why second layer solutions are being developed. Currently, almost all of my transactions pay a fee of <5 sats/vbyte. If I'm paying for a coffee, fast food, or some other small transaction, then a fee much higher than that starts to become a significant amount of the transaction and therefore unacceptable to me. Let's say, however, that I move all my coffee buying on to Lightning. Now I can pay a fee of 50 sats/vbyte to open a channel, and then buy 100 coffees through that channel before I need to close it. In this scenario I have saved money on fees by paying 0.5 sats/vbyte per each of my 100 transactions, but at the same time I have paid 10x what I would usually pay for the block space.

So provided there is enough demand for block space to support things like opening/closing Lightning channels at a higher fee rate (which is still economical for the end user), as well as very large transactions which will pay a higher fee for the added security of being on the base layer, then the fees paid could increase by an order of magnitude or more, while individual users still pay less by moving most of their transactions on to Lightning.

In this scenario then fees per block could total 1-2 BTC, rather than 0.1-0.2 BTC (example numbers), meaning a price of $80k rather than $800k in your example.

This opens up a new perspective in the discussion, which I had not thought of before now.
At the current block reward of 6.25BTC, miners averagely earn $122k - $125. Using the current average rate of one Bitcoin. If you include the tx fee, that's an extra ~$3k.

For the reward of mining to remain commensurate with the current value (in USD), i.e, 0.15BTC giving miners about the same amount they are earning now, which is ~$125k, then the value of 1 Bitcoin needs to rise to above $800k. That's a huge leap from the current price levels.
Would we likely be seeing $1 million to 1BTC within the next 25-30 years?

Firstly, not everyone is savvy in using the forum search option, or is aware of it.
Asking questions is also a form of learning and research, if the said user follows up on answers and discussions bordered around their questions.

Just as the answers were received by you that miners will depend on transaction charges to make thier income and that settles it all, but now about you OP, you just registered your account, don't you think tou need to engage some forum search in other to take survey on aspects like this related to your question maybe it had been talked about? If i were you, i will engage doing much of learning and research than talking just to build myself, finally, let me drop you with this Newbies - Read before posting

Sure, but this question will be become pertinent long before then. Average fees earned per block is somewhere in the region of 0.1 - 0.2 BTC at the moment. By the 9th halving, the block subsidy will be 0.09765625 BTC, which will mean it will be less than the average fees. This will happen around 2044, so only 20 years away. Another few halvings after that and the block subsidy will be ~10% of the total fees. If fees aren't enough to maintain the security of the network alone (as will be the case in 2140), then it is very unlikely that fees +10% will be enough to maintain the security of the network, which is scenario which will be reached in the lifetime of many (or even most) current bitcoin users.

I think the combination of the increasing value of bitcoin coupled with most smaller transactions moving to layer two, resulting in the base layer being used predominantly for larger transactions and channel opening/closing and therefore larger fees being acceptable, will be enough for fees alone to maintain the security of the network.

There is some very interesting discussion about this in the following forum thread and on the dev mailing list:
"Surprisingly, Tail Emission Is Not Inflationary" -- A post by Peter Todd
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2022-July/020665.html

I do not think it will be possible to mine all the 21 million bitcoins completely, but regarding what is going to happen after all 21 million bitcoins have been mined, all I have to say is what can be found online if you search for it and get it. When the price of bitcoin rises, this will lead to a greater value on the market. On the other hand, there will be fewer rewards for miners and they will only be able to make money through transaction fees, which is going to motivate miners to continue mining bitcoin.

I believe that not much will actually happen. The only difference is that following that, there won't be any more bitcoin to mine.
1. The bitcoin that miners earn for their effort after successfully mining a block into the blockchain will probably be kept by them for trading.
2. Bitcoin will continue to exist and their prices will fluctuate as long as people continue to own them, use them for transactions, and save money in them.
3. There won't be any more halvings where there is a constant spike in bitcoin's price prior to the halving.
4. As long as bitcoin is still in existence, miners can continue to support themselves by earning transaction fees after a transaction is included in a block.
5. Since blocks in the blockchain cannot be altered or attacked by hacktivists, the security of the bitcoin blockchain is already secured for now.

If all the 21 million Bitcoin are already mined, it means there's no more new Bitcoin to release. Which means that miners won't anymore receive block rewards. Bitcoin mining could continue but since there's no more Bitcoin left to mine, what they will receive in return will only be transaction fees. Today, miners receive block rewards and transaction fees. The moment the maximum supply is reached, only transaction fees remain.

The rest, whether it would still be profitable to mine, whether Bitcoin's security would remain intact, whether Bitcoin would finally face its end, and so on we could only speculate. After all, the last Satoshi wouldn't be mined until around the year 2140, long after we're all gone.

...so maybe OP should simply browse the forum history to get a profound response?

21 million bitcoin is mined. Miner won't just go away cus there'd be alot to adjust so some psycho-code enthusiast (hackers)won't keep on the grind till they finally got the blockchain compromised.
Nothing much will happen.

Sandra_

Miners will earn from the transaction fees as the block reward goes 0 somewhere near 2140.

When Bitcoin reaches its maximum supply cap, will miners stop operating? Most probably NO, since the system is designed so that the miners stay in the game. When there are more miners, the profit drops, driving more people away. And when there are less miners, profit increases, luring more miners again, repeating the same cycle.

- How will Bitcoin survive after all 21M coins have been mined?
- What happens when all bitcoins are mined?

This question has literally been asked millions of times.

A google search of your question returns

The answer is that nothing will happen. Nothing will change except that there will no longer be any new bitcoins.

Earning by fees will be the motivation to run miners long before the last few Bitcoins are mined. The last block reward will be 1 Satoshi for about 4 years.

I've been asked this questions many times, but it feels to me like I know answer it in the right way. I would like to know what do you think, and how you explain it in the most simple way, a way that people that are not technical can also understand