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Actually Bitcoin has transaction fees for exactly this purpose. The idea is that once all the coins are mined the primary way that miners make money is from the

Actually Bitcoin has transaction fees for exactly this purpose. The idea is that once all the coins are mined the primary way that miners make money is from the fees that people pay to miners to get their transactions recorded in the blockchain. For reference a lot of times you currently have to pay a fee of >$10 to get your transaction recorded in the blockchain, and estimates of around $10 million a day in transaction fees go to miners. Of course its questionable whether fees can actually support the ecosystem, but it is designed into the system.

sillysaurus3 9y ago
Yes, miners will receive transaction fees. But have you run the numbers on how much those transaction fees would have to be to match the current block reward? The endgame seems completely untenable. No one is going to pay a huge amount per BTC transfer. So what do you think will happen to all those miners, with all their mining equipment? We currently have a monstrous block reward every 10 minutes, and yet tx fees are already $10 to $20. Imagine how much the fees will be when there's no reward.
- mial 9y ago
  If I understood the system correctly, at that point mining would become much less profitable so a lot of miners would stop their operations. In that case, difficulty would automatically decrease at the same rate as miners quit, and at some point it would become somehow profitable for the remaining miners to subsist on transaction fees.
  - sillysaurus3 9y ago
    Note that difficulty adjustment happens every 2016 blocks. If the miners all decide to call it quits shortly after the previous difficulty change, the next 2016 blocks might take far longer than 10 minutes per block. Which of course means the next difficulty adjustment would take far longer than two weeks to trigger.
saas_co_de 9y ago
> questionable whether fees can actually support the ecosystem right now every block pays 12.5 coins, which even with current low prices is around $145K. The average transactions per block looks like around 1,800 (https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block) which puts mining revenue per transaction at around $80, on top of which miners also get the transaction fee. With no more mining where is the other $80 going to come from? More to the point, who in their right mind would ever use a transaction processing system that charges $80+ per transaction? What happens when you have a fixed currency stock and every transaction requires paying some of it to the transaction processors? Seems pretty unsustainable to me.
- Cyberdog 9y ago
  > With no more mining where is the other $80 going to come from? Are you asking where transaction fees come from? Well, if PayPal earns $3 when I use it to send you $100, where did that $3 come from? The truth is that I sent PayPal $103, PayPal kept $3, and you got $100. (These numbers are probably not exactly correct; I don't know what PayPal's actual fees are off the top of my head.) So the transaction fee comes from the person that made the payment. If what you're saying is that this means that miners will be able to accumulate all the BTC… well, yes, but that's what happens now. When you buy BTC, you are buying something that, at one point or other, was initially owned by a miner. So yes, miners could bring the whole system down if they just accumulate all the BTC for themselves, but they could already do that now, and they don't - instead they trade that BTC for fiat or (nowadays, perhaps) other cryptocurrencies, so it begins to circulate to others.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

Yes, miners will receive transaction fees. But have you run the numbers on how much those transaction fees would have to be to match the current block reward? The endgame seems completely untenable. No one is going to pay a huge amount per BTC transfer. So what do you think will happen to all those miners, with all their mining equipment? We currently have a monstrous block reward every 10 minutes, and yet tx fees are already $10 to $20. Imagine how much the fees will be when there's no reward.

mial 9y ago
If I understood the system correctly, at that point mining would become much less profitable so a lot of miners would stop their operations. In that case, difficulty would automatically decrease at the same rate as miners quit, and at some point it would become somehow profitable for the remaining miners to subsist on transaction fees.
- sillysaurus3 9y ago
  Note that difficulty adjustment happens every 2016 blocks. If the miners all decide to call it quits shortly after the previous difficulty change, the next 2016 blocks might take far longer than 10 minutes per block. Which of course means the next difficulty adjustment would take far longer than two weeks to trigger.

saas_co_de 9y ago

> questionable whether fees can actually support the ecosystem right now every block pays 12.5 coins, which even with current low prices is around $145K. The average transactions per block looks like around 1,800 (https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block https://blockchain.info/charts/n-transactions-per-block) which puts mining revenue per transaction at around $80, on top of which miners also get the transaction fee. With no more mining where is the other $80 going to come from? More to the point, who in their right mind would ever use a transaction processing system that charges $80+ per transaction? What happens when you have a fixed currency stock and every transaction requires paying some of it to the transaction processors? Seems pretty unsustainable to me.

Cyberdog 9y ago
> With no more mining where is the other $80 going to come from? Are you asking where transaction fees come from? Well, if PayPal earns $3 when I use it to send you $100, where did that $3 come from? The truth is that I sent PayPal $103, PayPal kept $3, and you got $100. (These numbers are probably not exactly correct; I don't know what PayPal's actual fees are off the top of my head.) So the transaction fee comes from the person that made the payment. If what you're saying is that this means that miners will be able to accumulate all the BTC… well, yes, but that's what happens now. When you buy BTC, you are buying something that, at one point or other, was initially owned by a miner. So yes, miners could bring the whole system down if they just accumulate all the BTC for themselves, but they could already do that now, and they don't - instead they trade that BTC for fiat or (nowadays, perhaps) other cryptocurrencies, so it begins to circulate to others.