I basically know how it works, that was just my interpretation of the scheme and I stick to it. But I think I used the term mining in an unorthodox way. What I

I basically know how it works, that was just my interpretation of the scheme and I stick to it. But I think I used the term mining in an unorthodox way. What I meant by mining is getting reward coins from doing the number-crunching required to find good hashes for blocks. I think the current semantics is that mining means doing that hash-finding number-crunching but it's also being used to refer to mining bitcoins which is maybe a bit misleading. Thus, I rephrase my statement: I maintain that bitcoin rewards themselves aren't necessary —— the rewards are just an incentive and indeed a convenient way to distribute bitcoins in a rather stable way. When we hit the 21 million mark and have no new bitcoins left, the number-crunching part would still have to continue. This is no problem because of transaction fees will provide a sufficient incentive for that. And this brings us back to my point that theoretically we could've started with just that. Theoretically, we could've started with distributing 21 million bitcoins to 21 million random people and let the peer-to-peer network start with doing only transaction verification, and incentivize that with transaction fees. (Probably wouldn't have worked in reality but that's only because of the human factor.) That's what I meant.