Topic: What would happen when 21 million bitcoins come into existence? (Read 1913 times)

It would need to be a pretty big fee each time a transaction is sent and we would also need to have mass adoption at this point to keep miners mining otherwise i think bitcoin will die a lonely death.

Bitcoin is a currency, so I think it will no be owned by very few people. People will use it to buy things.

When 21 million bitcoins come into existence maybe we will not be alive, but a good percentage of them will be lost and the rest will be held by few people like it is today and a percentage to others.

The price will go to the moon, as it always does after each halving.

When we've got 21 million coins the block reward would be tiny as hell. We need high BTC prices to incentivise miners.

I'm sure we won't see that happen

I tough that there will be always 21 million bitcoins, I hear now that they are so much lost bitcoins that you can get it back.
So I don't what will happen if it reach 21 million maybe we will come at the end a stable price for bitcoins if there is just 21 millions.
When is lost I think the worth of bitcoin will be more and more.

There are too many lost Bitcoins in the world. But figuratively, if 21 million Bitcoins came into existence, the price would shoot up because there would be no more coming onto the market.

I think the miners will earn money then via the tx fees while broadcasting through the blockchain.

too many time, we dont see it,

If mankind is going to adopt to bitcoins.. the price will rise the further we walk on timeline.

The only thing that stood out in that long post was this line. Nothing related to price is guaranteed. Price has to keep up with the rise in computing power on the network for miners to earn consistent returns. If price doesn't keep up, mining income falls. At the halving, my prediction is it forces a lot of miners out of the market who can't mine enough to break even.

Good question!
Personally I don't think that too much will change.

If the hashrate drops significantly, that might have a negative effect on the price.
But if we can't get any more btc by mining, that might have a positive effect on the price.

Will be interesting to see when the time comes!

I think if price doesn't get increased, it may crash the bitcoin system. As to compensate miners reward per transaction fee slould be increased where as for senders that fee will be quite bigger than what we have today.

We need more number of bitcoins in slow progress. That's the reason Satoshi designed bitcoin as controlled supply over time.
When all the 21M bitcoins will be mined out, there will be a demand for bitcoin like 1000 more times of bitcoin is required. This will help bitcoin value appreciations. Further more, satoshi or bits type of usage will solve the demand in greater ways.

I think the future lies on the colored coins which are stored into the Bitcoin blockchain. Bitcoin itself will just keep the reward for maintaining and supporting the network.

When the price goes up, the fee from the transaction can support the mining infrastructure. The miners can still make some profit.

much better to say when the last coin was mined. by the way i think the price will increase hiigh rocketed to the moon containing your private key..

dont worry about the lost coins. satoshi once said "Lost coins only make everyone else’s coins worth slightly
more,

I think that we will not be alive when all 21 million will come into existence because it is far away from now, but it depends on the popularity which i believe the price will be to the moon.

I think the price will go up, because people will see that the supply is really limited. I want to know will transactions increase, because miners will not be rewarded blocks anymore?

After further thoughts, this is a complex topic, involving several variables

At each reward halving, to keep the miners running with same incentive, either the bitcoin price need to double or the fee income per block would compensate for the loss of the block reward

Currently the fee income per block is around 0.5 bitcoin, very little comparing with the block reward. So the only thing works is to raise the bitcoin price by 100%, otherwise miners will shutdown their operation due to unable to profit, resulting in weak security

After a couple of halving, 12.5, 6.25, 3.125, 1.5625, 0.78125, 0.390625, the block reward will become less than the fee per block today. I think that price doubles every 4 years are still guaranteed, so the incentive holds

However the development of fee per block is different, this is decided by the cpu/network capacity increase and possible other scaling solutions

In general, there is an extra delay when including one transaction, and that delay will increase the risk of a block being orphaned thus lose the whole block reward altogether. If you include 2000 transactions today (1MB block), that will add up to 1 minute delay when broadcasting to the whole network, which is about 5% risk of being orphaned (not precisely calculated from poisson distribution, just an example, 10 minutes delay means the block will be orphaned half of the time), so 5%x25btc=1.25 btc is the cost of 1MB, divided by 2000 transactions, you get 0.000625 btc fee per transaction, which is a fee that is accepted by all the miners today, which means the real cost is lower today

If the cpu/network speed doubles at next reward halving, then each block can include double amount of transaction at the same opportunity cost today, e.g. 4000 transactions for 5% risk of being orphaned. However, the block reward is 12.5 coins by then, 5%x12.5btc=0.625 btc is the cost of 2MB, divided by 4000 transactions, that is 0.00015625 fee per transaction

So the fee will be cut to 1/4 at next reward halving, if bitcoin price doubled, then it means the fee is getting 1/2 cheaper for end user. If bitcoin price quadrupled, then the fee costs the same as today

Following this route, when block reward is cut by half, the fee per block will also cut by half, with double amount of transaction capacity, resulting in 1/4 of the btc fee per transaction. If bitcoin's value x4 every 4 years, then the fee per transaction will stay at current level. If bitcoin's value X8 every 4 years, the fee will double each time, still manageable for decades. It seems that the fee per block will stay small relative to block reward in foreseeable future

And this is the case that you directly use blockchain to do transaction, if you use clearing based solutions then the fee can be 0 for end user, and the real traffic on blockchain might grow much slower

I personally don't think anything will happen. Maybe the TX fee would become 0.01-0.001, to compensate the miners.


But there still would be one in existence - just lost.


But if this happened, bitcoin will either crash, because the TX fee is so high, or bitcoin will become very very cheap to compensate for the TX fee.

Sure, there will never be 21 million in circulation, but he very likely means what is happening when all Bitcoins are mined. Besides the fact, that it will need more than 100 years, there will be some solutions and new developments which will prevent a crash to 0.

I guess long before that, the fee will rise to a level that is enough to maintain the incentive of miners, maybe 1 bitcoin per block forever. It can be that every 4 years, the fee doubles to compensate the loss in block reward, at the same time the number of transactions per block might also doubled to keep the fee per transaction roughtly the same level

21M will still be minted. There's a difference between the number circulating (active supply) and the number existing (total supply). Coins lost decrease active supply, the total supply will still be 21 million. However, as far as price per coin is concerned, only active supply will matter.

hashrate of bitcoin gonna go down hard.
price increase,.

That's a very difficult to answer question.
The reason is until the last coin is mined it will take another 124 years!!
Who knows if Bitcoin will still be around at that time.
Maybe mankind will have destroyed itself until then.We tend to be very good in self destruction it seems.

You realize that end of mining is planned for year 2140? We will be dead long dead before that happen, bitcoin will be probably destroyed first by government regulations or will evolve into something different or will be replaced by entirely different cryptocurrency issued by official authorities. It's hard to say what will happen in next 5 years really...

What will happen? It's simple. Since no more Bitcoins can be minted, the pools will purely rely on the income of transaction fees. By that time the global adoption has probably been completed, and the price has skyrocketed. The fee income will probably be worth tripple, if not more than the currently generated 25BTC block value in $$$. But we won't know exactly what will happen as we won't make it till the last few bits have been minted 

Haha my friend, I don't really care! I will be long gone from this world in 2140!

On the more serious note, I do think that Bitcoin will work even then as imagined!

If that ever happens.
Then probably all of us here in the forum will start hunting.

First of all never can be 21 000 000 bitcoin in existence or in circulation (including those in all the e-wallets ready to be spent). Because there are to many lost already (known cases) and even the one million of Satoshi which, is revealed and put in circulation, can make possible the discovered of him. Then according to Wikipedia: "While the number of bitcoins in existence will never exceed 21 million, the money supply of bitcoins can exceed 21 million due to Fractional-reserve Banking". Read more about the "money supply here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

When all the possible bitcoin will be produced and there cannot be more such to be make for sure can be an increase of price (if other conditions not connected with bitcoin as an invention will be fulfilled) of it. It is easy to be understood why. There cannot be more increase of supply in the market of bitcoin and there can be always more and more increase of demand for it. This is a classical case which bring increase of the price of the good which is subject of this situation. In or case, of bitcoin.  No doubt about this. The only doubt is that this may be in question-mark, if bitcoin would not be accepted or even worst, banned, by the majority of the world countries. In this situation cannot be told nothing for sure and everything is possible.

When 21 million bitcoin will reach I think the price will be increasing, because I believe in the future a lot of people will use bitcoin.


Well you are wrong they are still 21 million bitcoins, at first I didn't understood why is still 21 million bitcoins. So yeah the max is always go to be 21 million bitcoins.

I don't think anything will happen, I think by then the price would be sky rocket high.
I really doubt I would still be alive to witness this, so I'm not too into it.

There is still 21 million bitcoin. You simply moved one of the bitcoins to wallet and lost it's private key. The bitcoin is still there. It's like hiding 100 dollars and saying it never existed (with the difference that there is infinite amount of dollars theoretically).

Price should be high if bitcoin don't die by that time , but most of all we will be all dead at that time so who knows ... also people will be dying with time and some bitcoins will be lost by time as-well so this should make the balance and make bitcoin worth more .

bitcoin price would have already been on the sky since years prior that, fee would be bigger but also the spendeable bitcoin would be less

also there will be no 21M but much less, because many are not retrievable anymore, they are lost who know where...

I think once we hit 21 million the miners will them start collecting higher fees instead of collecting new coins.

By then the flow of new coins will have been little more than a microscopic trickle for many decades. If there are to be deflationary effects then they'll be felt a long old time before then. Even within a decade the annual inflation rate will be under 2%. If there's demand then that only means one direction.

It is the same thing which will happen when 20.9 Mn bitcoins are in existence.
The infusion of new bitcoins into the system will be so slow, that the stoppage of new bitcoins will not make a difference

Zombies in space. Well 21M will never happen because there are plenty lost. If there's no more BTC to mine then we could all agree that Bitcoin had come a long way if it's still alive by that time.

There will never be 21 Million bitcoin because I purposely bought one way back when and sent it to a wallet to be lost forever, because i could 

Everyone living now will be dead by then unless they find a cure for immortality or cryogenization of bodies is a success and people like Hal Finney are brought back to life 100's of years from now which right now is pretty much sci-fi. So I would not think too much about this, but the bottom line is, Bitcoin should be around 1 billion per coin or something ridiculous by then.

I don't expect much will happen directly. The price can grow if their is more usage oppertunities, then the price increases.

If everything stays the same the price will increase since the need for bitcoin is growing, but we are talking about very small percentages.

As the title says, what do you guys think will happen to the price of bitcoin when 21 million bitcoins come into existence? Will the price dip? Will the price shoot up? Will the price hit 0? What do you guys think?