There is a fixed curve that determines the rate that new Bitcoins come into the Bitcoin economy. Right now, that adds 25 BTC per block (or about 3600 BTC per da

There is a fixed curve that determines the rate that new Bitcoins come into the Bitcoin economy. Right now, that adds 25 BTC per block (or about 3600 BTC per day, or $720,000 USD/day). The number of coins added per block halves about every 4 years, and has halved once already. This is the primary method of introducing a sort of 'inflation' to the economy to help bootstrap the Bitcoin economy and the miner network. [1] The other method of rewarding miners to perform block hashing proof-of-work computation is through transaction fees; even now some (most?) miners do not accept transactions without a small fee attached, currently an equivalent of a few USD cents per transaction. The idea is that at some point, transaction fees will have to take over from the block reward as motivation for mining. Regardless of the costs involved, since the work factor corrects for the amount of mining activity, even a single interested person mining is enough to keep the Bitcoin network going (though that invites some bad scenarios - a group of people is much better...) As things are going and with ASIC mining becoming commonplace there will definitely be enough interest to keep things going on the technical side for the far future. [2] [1] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_Currency_Supply [2] https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Mining also, the FAQ: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_does_the_halving_work_when_the_number_gets_really_small.3F https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#How_does_the_halving_work_whe...