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Seems pretty obvious to me that "mining" is a loser's game, you are fighting over what slice you get of a fixed size pie. By contrast, selling stuff for BTC act
by JulianMorrison 15y ago
Seems pretty obvious to me that "mining" is a loser's game, you are fighting over what slice you get of a fixed size pie. By contrast, selling stuff for BTC actually grows the "market cap" of coins, that seems a lot more sensible.
That said, I have a technical question. What happens to the BTC system if people mostly quit mining?
- stonemetal 15y agoThe system contracts and it becomes easier to mine. As long as the number of clients doesn't approach zero, transactions should be OK.
- JulianMorrison 15y agoWhat about when the number of BTC has gotten close enough to 21 million that mining nearly never returns any new ones? The number of miners could fall to something approaching zero.
- maaku 15y agoThe hope is that miners will still make money off of transaction fees (a "tip" to the miner which verifies the transaction). Each new block assigns 50 BTC to the miner that found it, plus the accumulated fees of all transactions included in that block. The idea is that as mining new bitcoins becomes unprofitable, the transaction fees (set by the initiator of the transaction) will make up the difference. That theory has yet to be tested, though.
- winthrowe 15y agoIn addition to the block reward (currently 50 and approaching zero) the miner gets any transaction fees for transactions included in the block. At the present, the block reward massively exceeds the transaction fees, but that will eventually skew the other way.