I feel like people fundamentally don't understand how different everything would and will be if we get quantum computers. They will be able to brute force crack a 7 digit password with no knowledge of any characters in less than a minute. They could do a 15 character password in less than 10 minutes. Its such an unfathomable jump. Bitcoin would be fucked
Kind of. One thing that is easy to miss is that not all problems are solved with quantum. Some problems are factorisation-of-large primes; Shor's algorithm provides an exponential speed-up for this - that's why quantum threatens all public key security (the foundation for HTTPS). Grover's algorithm is about finding a value in an unsorted list - pretty much password guessing, including cracking password hashes. Grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speed up - which in most modern cases isn't scary. So you are right, cracking will be faster with quantum, but the underlying algorithm and key length matter. E.g. AES256 is considered quantum safe for now.
No, because they can swap to quantum encryption. Bitcoin can not do that. The way we mine bitcoin and the whole block chain is toast in a quantum world because it's locked in. Thats the tough part
Blockchain will adapt the same way it always has. Way back before most of us were even aware of BTC someone managed to mint a billion of them and then the network forked and it moved along smoothly until another issue came. Same thing will happen with quantum.
Something even more powerful will probably come along after quantum, either we all die and everything fails or someone thinks of a way to protect us. Just like we have with quantum.
And it’s naive to think Bitcoin will be what quantum is used for unless it actually somehow manages to become a reserve similar to gold. Nations will most likely use it to cripple defences and logistic / supply chains far before they try and crack the code to a few billion dollars.
I mean, assuming its just numbers in your PIN, its already easily cracked. You can break 12-digit or less numbers basically as soon as you ask a modern computer to do it. That's only ~1 trillion combinations or so. Even if you have an 8-digit code with all Unicode characters possible its able to be cracked in under a minute.
Something more powerful will come after quantum.
There are already post-quantum encryption algorithms available. The problem is there is a 0% chance you can convince the entire Bitcoin community (including every wallet that's ever been forgotten) to switch to a new algorithm. You'd end up in a Bitcoin cash situation.
There are neumerous problems in computation that no computer will ever solve no matter how efficient. There are ways to utilize these fundamentally unknowable properties to encode information. Granted, it will take time to adjust, perhaps a bit of a panic--look at Y2K for instance; suddenly everyone needed to fix one specific problem with all of their computers or else shit is fucked, but they did it just fine in the end--. What I'm saying is, there are ways to defend against brute-force quantum decryption. It doesn't just magically solve every problem we have with modern computers.
Like, AI is a good tool for categorizing information and identifying patterns but it likely isn't going to write a decent novel...ever. Quantum computation has its role in specific feilds that I'm not too knowledgeable about personally, but it isn't Computer Jesus.
Don’t forget the satoshi wallets with the billion of bitcoins will be hacked once quantum computing starts unless he wakes up from the dead to upgrade his old wallets
They currently don't do anything so any numbers or timelines are pulled out of thin air. The entire quantum industry is just nerds plugging away at an impossible machine and dipshit salesmen trying to drum up investment through misinformation and sci fi utopian optimism for the masses.
Theres no way. Quantum computers is like comparing us walking to the speed of an airplane. The mining difficulty doesn't scale at that level because, in this comparison, it was made before the invention of planes. So they made the difficulty adjuetments on the idea we were at "walking speed" but 8 hours walking is literally not even 10 minutes in an airplane. So itll add time, but it won't matter
“We’ll be dead by then” isn’t that like the boomers motto and why the world is in such a fucked up state right now? Why don’t we have these discussions now and try to figure out a way to fix it in code before the chickens come home to roost on our children?
I agree, but I’m not like most maxi. I don’t think Bitcoin is the end all be all, I just think it’s the best thing we have available now.
I also think AI will drastically change our lives and society in ways people haven’t imagined long before the last block reward.
The answer most people have is that transactions that actually happen on chain will be only for the extremely wealthy and nations because it will be the most secure way to transact value. So paying a large transaction fee will be worth it in this scenario. While daily transactions and the public will use systems like the lightning network which is still secure but it’s not to the same level as Bitcoin chain transactions.
I’m also not anywhere close to understanding Bitcoin or the digital world to really grasp it’s possibilities, so I’ll leave some trust in the people that are smart and hope that they find a solution for my grandchildren.
What most people don't realize is that the block subsidy will by halved so much by 2060 that the last 20 halvings (the 80 years between 2060 and 2140) won't even matter.
If you overlay this cycle's block subsidy chart over the previous cycle's, this is the first halving cycle where the block subsidy wasn't multiples higher than the previous cycle's (even before adjusting for inflation). I believe we're already past peak security budget, and it'll just keep declining faster and faster every cycle until the block reward is mostly transaction fees.
That is a terrible argument. The main selling point of Bitcoin is that there will never be more than 21 million coins. So currently there is some inflation and eventually it will stop. However, the current inflation is paying for the security of the network. So asking "what happens afterwards?" is absolutely central to the assertion that there will never be more than 21 million coins.
In other words: If we don't know now what the plan in 2148 is then Bitcoin has a problem now, not in a hundred years. That plan may change in the meantime, but without that plan "21 million coins" is an empty promise.
Not an argument, just a statement. Transaction fees is currently the idea. I just don’t really love that idea and it won’t happen for 100+ years so I hope a better solution comes before then or something better than Bitcoin will be created/ discovered.
You're answering the question "what would be required to sustain the security of BTC without mining rewards?". The answer to that is high fees. But fees will only be high if there's enough demand for transactions. People gotta be willing to pay hundreds to thousands of (today's) dollars per transaction. That's just not very likely considering there are plenty of other ways to hold and transact BTC.
Without demand the revenue from fees will only be able to sustain a fraction of today's mining, potentially making the network vulnerable to 51% attacks. It's one of the biggest unanswered questions of Bitcoin.
Valuable because it is finite: what is stopping any bitcoin 2.0 with another equation and new fresh stock to mine.
Unlike metals the bitcoin source is infinite
Everyone focuses on the 21M cap, but polymarket traders are already modeling effective supply way lower once you factor in lost coins. That remaining million is doing a lot of heavy lifting in people’s mental models
There’s no point in mining anymore, blockchain will seize unless it goes to POS. Once the farms stop the gov have a chance to setup enough miners that they control 51% of the network
We'll start to find out in 2-3 more cycles when the security budget starts declining. The first change is that many miners will go out of business start selling their equipment. By 2035-2040, even Bitcoin maxis will have to stop pretending it's no longer an issue.
This is the first cycle where the security budget is slightly lower than at the same point during the previous cycle. Previously, it would jump 100x or 10x every cycle. (Bitcoin may have reached peak security in 2024. If we ignore that brief peak in 2024, the 50-day average peak was in 2021)
Yes. The security model of bitcoin relies on a 'we'll cross that bridge when we come to it' method. Well that bridge is almost here and unless the 21 million supply is increased, bitcoin is screwed. Subsequently if it is increased, bitcoin is also screwed.
In 20 years, the reward will be 97% smaller, so we should be concerned a lot sooner. The block subsidy reward for the last 80 years will be so small that it's practically already $0.
No, fees are auction based, meaning they will always be low.
Increased demand for transactions never leads to an increase in supply of transactions because the block space is capped at 1mb.
This means increased demand only leads to a temporary increase in transaction fees.
Since supply never increases, demand can never be above supply for a prolonged period of time. Backlog would build, wait times would increase and demand would naturally be killed off. People aren’t going to wait weeks, months, or an indeterminate period of timefor a transaction to process, regardless if they’ve willing to pay high fees.
This means demand will always be below supply, which means fees will never be high because it’s an auction and users will never have to outbid someone in the long run. Fees can only ever temporarily spike higher before returning to near zero.
ppl are buying bitcoin to get rich, then, ppl will mine to get rich. there will be no hash solving reward but opportunity to get your reward by manipulating transactions.
Bitcoin rising in price doesn't help here, yes on the one hand it increases the revenue of miners, but at the same time it increases the potential value of a 51% attack to an attacker.
If you think about it, as each halvening reduces the amount of BTC going to miners but does not reduce the total amount of BTC, increasing the price per BTC will always increase the reward to an attacker faster than it increases the security budget.
Said a different way, if the cost to attack the network is now $40B (just as an example) and the marketcap is $1.8T, then next halvening in order to keep the money going to miners constant we need to double the price of BTC. The cost to attack the network then remains $40B, but the marketcap would now be $3.6T, so the risk to reward ratio of an attacker has become twice as enticing!
They will continue to recieve transaction fees, and the value of those fees continues to move up significantly over time.
If the drop in revenue (in BTC terms) is more than the drop in costs (energy prices continue to go down in BTC terms) then the most inefficient miners will drop out. As they do, the remaining miners earn more revenue. Mining will always be profitable for some.
Satoshi designed it as a smaller motor (the block reward) to kickstart a bigger motor (the fees from transactions) so that it could reach a Nash equilibrium where billions of small fees pay for the electricity needed to secure the network from bad actors and be inflation free. To make this possible he designed the Bitcoin blockchain to discard old transactions and not store them forever, but instead only storing the result of validating a transaction and then putting the result in a merkle tree and only storing the outer layers. By doing so you can always check if a transaction was valid by it's hash even if you don't have any other data about the transaction. This design only grows the blockchain by 4.2 MB a year. (and the utxo set some years it will grow in size, other years it will become smaller again)
But after Satoshi left we had our own plans and did nothing to continue implementing the design in code, and the fees becoming unpredictable (not high, just unpredictable) in 2015 and 2016 was enough to make microsoft and steam drop Bitcoin as a currency. Having people bid against each other to be able to make a transaction prevents use as currency.
So the kickstarter motor to incentivize the system to start the bigger motor has never happened.
Bitcoin will most likely get tail emissions making it have inflation again and this will eventually also fail as a store of value.
fun fact: Lightning network transactions could be a billion a day, and miners would make nothing on it.
But there is also hope. It's possible that Bitcoin find adoption with banks and central banks who will start using it to settle transactions between each other. In such a future a Bitcoin transaction would cost more then a 1000 dollars and 99,999% of the population will be priced out from using it and be force to use it through a bank account with zero control over anything. Today banks are already globally doing a 100 settlement transactions a second but with Bitcoin's code only allowing 2 floppy disk worth of transactions to be processed every 10 minutes that's only enough for maybe 20. So if the banks start competiting with each other for that 20 transactions a second, by offering higher and higher fees to the miners then the amount of sats needed for a transactions gets pushed higher and higher. Most people their coins will get locked up forever as you would need more sats to move then you have sats. That's another misconception about Bitcoin. You don't pay per transaction, you pay per utxo. Your 1 BTC might be spread over 200 utxos. So if you try to move 0.5 BTC and you access a 100 utxo's you are paying the price of a normal transaction times a 100. But this is good for Bitcoin as that means the majority of Bitcoin is to spread out over utxo's to over be able to move again, so it can't be sold either! Limiting the supply massively and pushing the price up to insane heights! So you will be rich on paper, but without actually being able to do anything.
Millions of transactions will never work because if you read the Bitcoin whitepaper it clearly says that transactions need to be stored forever.
Here it is in point 7.
Once the latest transaction in a coin is buried under enough blocks, the spent transactions before
it can be discarded to save disk space. To facilitate this without breaking the block's hash,
transactions are hashed in a Merkle Tree [7][2][5], with only the root included in the block's hash.
Old blocks can then be compacted by stubbing off branches of the tree. The interior hashes do
not need to be stored.
A block header with no transactions would be about 80 bytes. If we suppose blocks are
generated every 10 minutes, 80 bytes * 6 * 24 * 365 = 4.2MB per year. With computer systems
typically selling with 2GB of RAM as of 2008, and Moore's Law predicting current growth of
1.2GB per year, storage should not be a problem even if the block headers must be kept in
memory
So there is the math which shows that storage will become a big problem so we need to keep the blocksize as small as a floppy disk and not use Bitcoin to buy coffee with. Because Bitcoin is NOT the money of the internet. And spending it is ridiculous. You don't spend gold. I read all of this in the Bitcoin whitepaper titled "Bitcoin, a store of value to make you richer then gold invented by Adam Back"
Don't need to wait anywhere near that long. We should be able to see the effects 15 years from now.
By then, only 0.1% of the supply will be unmined. The block subsidy will already be so small that the transaction fees will start overtaking the subsidy. In the 100 years between 2040 and 2140, mining rewards will mostly come from transaction fees.
By then, we should be able to tell if Bitcoin can remain secure from 51% attacks if it only costs 0.05% of the total market cap worth of Bitcoin in mining equipment to attack it. Many miners will be quitting the market, so it should be easy for a multi-billionaire to buy up enough to attack the network.
Yep, a big one short changes variable and dilutes BTC/50. Good not a single central bank is buying BTC, they know what their real value is alike gold...
how many coins left to mine does not mean much, there will always be someone willing to sell, at the right price, and everyone has a price. There will always to Davinci and Picaso for sale.
Does it make any difference if there is 1m bitcoin to mine or just 200k? As far as i understand its just about knowledge that there are limited supply which is 21m. Unmined btc doesnt matter + it doesnt get mined in our life time anyway.
And you've done research into this and have a thought out and informed theoretical frame work you can explain how this will work and how all work arounds won't scale?
I only have two things to say, one a question/opinion and a plain question:
1 - If bitcoin is meant to be used as a currency, wont the "end" of bitcoin mining help stabilize its value and therefore give it more credibility as currency rather than asset?
2 - Since we are "nearing" the end of bitcoin mining, is it a good idea to get some before the day of days arrives?
Bitcoin will never be used as a currency. With 10 minute block times and several confirmations required before your transaction is considered final, you can't really use it for everyday payments. Imagine having to wait 50 minutes after paying for your coffee before you can leave because they have to make sure the transaction doesn't get reverted.
I love the idea that all these businesses set up industrial datacenters to mine bitcoin, meanwhile you used to be able to mine it on your cpu on a web page. Once those coins are mined, every 1$ invested in those massive centers is WASTED, poof, just like that
Nobody mentioned this in the thread yet but a 51% attack by double spending from a bad actor probably isn't what would most likely happen if the security drops because there aren't enough profitable miners to mine it.
A more likely scenario is that large state actors would be able to fund the remaining mining companies in large enough numbers to effectively centralize the chain by proxy. "We'll keep you afloat as long as you block certain transactions". Or large state actors spin up their own miners leveraging the states energy infrastructure such that they effectively control a large portion of the network themselves, if they coordinate in this effort they effectively centralize it.
I think the Maxis are going to have to have some tough discussions around how to handle the future of the chain because eventually this will become inevitable, and relatively soon (2-3 more cycles if monetary inflation doesn't keep up).
I think if BTC wants to keep its decentralized network a perpetual small block subsidy prevents the security budget from ever collapsing enough that miners would fall to state actors, or transaction fees get so high that the chain becomes practically unusable for most. But it would slowly inflate the supply. I think this is the best option so far, as long as the inflation is reasonable enough that it doesn't completely negate the scarcity narrative of the coin. We can average the rate of lost coins and use that as a metric baseline for the inflation rate. I think the average joe wouldn't care enough to sway them for/against the coin, and the maxis are not really going to have a choice soon because there aren't any serious alternatives that maintain the value of it while making the coin practically usable and secure. Although I'm open to other ideas.
So why would price increase if it did not increase by now? Simple, only because speculators. Sadly for you speculators are short so drill till 44.000$. Thanks for your attention on this matter bagholders.
This is like that meme, where you see the guy and says I’m coming, and he keeps coming for decades but it gives the vibe that he is coming. The last fraction of BTC will be minted in 2140, I’ll be gone by then, my kids will be gone, it’s good to know, but the minting is not as important now, as it is with the price shock.
But we GOT to HODL!!!
Everyone talking about quantum computing in here but dont understand how the qubits ACTUALLY work in quantum computing as it applies to cryptography let alone Bitcoin and blockchain ledgers.
Oh look, a disingenuous rhetorical question to which no answer will be acceptable because the person stating it is in a cult! First time I have seen this one today.
And what happens then?
Excessive gas fees for every transaction.
Everyone here and currently being born will be dead by then… ~2148 is when mining rewards will end.
Trying to make predictions about anything including money, SoV, and society in that time frame is dumber than buying $PEPE
That assumes quantum computers won't play a massive role in mining bitcoin lol
Difficultly adjustment, 10 minutes always.
I feel like people fundamentally don't understand how different everything would and will be if we get quantum computers. They will be able to brute force crack a 7 digit password with no knowledge of any characters in less than a minute. They could do a 15 character password in less than 10 minutes. Its such an unfathomable jump. Bitcoin would be fucked
Kind of. One thing that is easy to miss is that not all problems are solved with quantum. Some problems are factorisation-of-large primes; Shor's algorithm provides an exponential speed-up for this - that's why quantum threatens all public key security (the foundation for HTTPS). Grover's algorithm is about finding a value in an unsorted list - pretty much password guessing, including cracking password hashes. Grover's algorithm provides a quadratic speed up - which in most modern cases isn't scary. So you are right, cracking will be faster with quantum, but the underlying algorithm and key length matter. E.g. AES256 is considered quantum safe for now.
If bitcoin is fucked, then all of the banks/governments are fucked.
It’s also silly to think that some random schmo with ill intent, is going to be the one with the quantum computer.
Bro, have you met the government(s)?
No, because they can swap to quantum encryption. Bitcoin can not do that. The way we mine bitcoin and the whole block chain is toast in a quantum world because it's locked in. Thats the tough part
Bitcoin could just fork into different “quantum safe” hash or lattice based signatures.
So who makes that decision then for all of Bitcoin?
Lmao didn’t the Colonel say something like this in MGS2?
Have you heard of how Bitcoin Cash came to be?
Kind of makes you wonder if the community would reject a hard fork that is Quantum resistant.
The drug dealers around where I live with ill intentions are the only ones driving new cars
Lol have you heard of elon musk? He could easily do it and probably would.
I guess my 4 digit bank code is useless too?
Blockchain will adapt the same way it always has. Way back before most of us were even aware of BTC someone managed to mint a billion of them and then the network forked and it moved along smoothly until another issue came. Same thing will happen with quantum.
Something even more powerful will probably come along after quantum, either we all die and everything fails or someone thinks of a way to protect us. Just like we have with quantum.
And it’s naive to think Bitcoin will be what quantum is used for unless it actually somehow manages to become a reserve similar to gold. Nations will most likely use it to cripple defences and logistic / supply chains far before they try and crack the code to a few billion dollars.
I mean, assuming its just numbers in your PIN, its already easily cracked. You can break 12-digit or less numbers basically as soon as you ask a modern computer to do it. That's only ~1 trillion combinations or so. Even if you have an 8-digit code with all Unicode characters possible its able to be cracked in under a minute.
There are already post-quantum encryption algorithms available. The problem is there is a 0% chance you can convince the entire Bitcoin community (including every wallet that's ever been forgotten) to switch to a new algorithm. You'd end up in a Bitcoin cash situation.
Did you research what the solutions are to this ?
There are neumerous problems in computation that no computer will ever solve no matter how efficient. There are ways to utilize these fundamentally unknowable properties to encode information. Granted, it will take time to adjust, perhaps a bit of a panic--look at Y2K for instance; suddenly everyone needed to fix one specific problem with all of their computers or else shit is fucked, but they did it just fine in the end--. What I'm saying is, there are ways to defend against brute-force quantum decryption. It doesn't just magically solve every problem we have with modern computers.
Like, AI is a good tool for categorizing information and identifying patterns but it likely isn't going to write a decent novel...ever. Quantum computation has its role in specific feilds that I'm not too knowledgeable about personally, but it isn't Computer Jesus.
Don’t forget the satoshi wallets with the billion of bitcoins will be hacked once quantum computing starts unless he wakes up from the dead to upgrade his old wallets
They currently don't do anything so any numbers or timelines are pulled out of thin air. The entire quantum industry is just nerds plugging away at an impossible machine and dipshit salesmen trying to drum up investment through misinformation and sci fi utopian optimism for the masses.
Guess I'll buy some more gold. Imagine if Bitcoin is actually fucked. Gold is even liked by Maxi's. It'll skyrocket.
Because of one comment on reddit?
I was mostly joking. Bitcoin will upgrade and be fine.
Doesn't difficulty scale with hash power? Not saying it can keep up if quantum miners happen but maybe it'll slow them down a little
In your opinion how do you think automatic difficulty adjustment will handle quantum. Will it keep up?
Theres no way. Quantum computers is like comparing us walking to the speed of an airplane. The mining difficulty doesn't scale at that level because, in this comparison, it was made before the invention of planes. So they made the difficulty adjuetments on the idea we were at "walking speed" but 8 hours walking is literally not even 10 minutes in an airplane. So itll add time, but it won't matter
They can only mine at most 5% if they started right now, so no they unequivocally will not play a massive role.
“We’ll be dead by then” isn’t that like the boomers motto and why the world is in such a fucked up state right now? Why don’t we have these discussions now and try to figure out a way to fix it in code before the chickens come home to roost on our children?
I agree, but I’m not like most maxi. I don’t think Bitcoin is the end all be all, I just think it’s the best thing we have available now.
I also think AI will drastically change our lives and society in ways people haven’t imagined long before the last block reward.
The answer most people have is that transactions that actually happen on chain will be only for the extremely wealthy and nations because it will be the most secure way to transact value. So paying a large transaction fee will be worth it in this scenario. While daily transactions and the public will use systems like the lightning network which is still secure but it’s not to the same level as Bitcoin chain transactions.
I’m also not anywhere close to understanding Bitcoin or the digital world to really grasp it’s possibilities, so I’ll leave some trust in the people that are smart and hope that they find a solution for my grandchildren.
!remind me in 123 years
What most people don't realize is that the block subsidy will by halved so much by 2060 that the last 20 halvings (the 80 years between 2060 and 2140) won't even matter.
If you overlay this cycle's block subsidy chart over the previous cycle's, this is the first halving cycle where the block subsidy wasn't multiples higher than the previous cycle's (even before adjusting for inflation). I believe we're already past peak security budget, and it'll just keep declining faster and faster every cycle until the block reward is mostly transaction fees.
That assumes longevity tech just hasn’t stopped aging in mice and monkeys
That is a terrible argument. The main selling point of Bitcoin is that there will never be more than 21 million coins. So currently there is some inflation and eventually it will stop. However, the current inflation is paying for the security of the network. So asking "what happens afterwards?" is absolutely central to the assertion that there will never be more than 21 million coins.
In other words: If we don't know now what the plan in 2148 is then Bitcoin has a problem now, not in a hundred years. That plan may change in the meantime, but without that plan "21 million coins" is an empty promise.
Not an argument, just a statement. Transaction fees is currently the idea. I just don’t really love that idea and it won’t happen for 100+ years so I hope a better solution comes before then or something better than Bitcoin will be created/ discovered.
You're answering the question "what would be required to sustain the security of BTC without mining rewards?". The answer to that is high fees. But fees will only be high if there's enough demand for transactions. People gotta be willing to pay hundreds to thousands of (today's) dollars per transaction. That's just not very likely considering there are plenty of other ways to hold and transact BTC.
Without demand the revenue from fees will only be able to sustain a fraction of today's mining, potentially making the network vulnerable to 51% attacks. It's one of the biggest unanswered questions of Bitcoin.
Once all the btc is mined, then everyone just trades it amongst themselves based off the price of actual currency.
Its valuable because its finite.
Just like my farts. Theres only so many. And honestly, my farts are way cheaper, but I do hold the entire float.
Pretty sure you mine those too
Just gonna go mine some asteroids.
This is real life, not planetarion
Hemorrhoids* FTFY.
Is this a meme or your honest opinion?
Do I believe it? Yes, to an extent.
Is it also a joke? Yes of course.
What do you beleive happens after the final block has been mined? Which isn't the final block a fraction of a BTC?
wdym by farts? is it something else in crypto world?
You can buy a whiff by burning Fartcoin, its currently only got a marketcap of 286 milllion. So only up from here!
sorry but wht u meant by term whiff
Thats a part of the governing proctocol.
Governing proctology.
Exactly, have you read the brown paper?
It used to be white.
Joke
I think you have lactose intolerance
what will keep miners mining if there is no reward?
Valuable because it is finite: what is stopping any bitcoin 2.0 with another equation and new fresh stock to mine.
Unlike metals the bitcoin source is infinite
A lot of power and GPUs that were used are diverted to purposes that may actually help humanity.
Lol that made me laugh way too hard.
Nah, they'll mine a different coin.
Yeah cause they were all doing folding at home before cryto lmao.
Miners hard fork and increase supply
Everyone focuses on the 21M cap, but polymarket traders are already modeling effective supply way lower once you factor in lost coins. That remaining million is doing a lot of heavy lifting in people’s mental models
Only a mil left and people still calling it early like it’s 2015. Supply is basically on life support at this point
Musk reaches 1 quintillion (1000x a trillion, what hes about to reach and be by 2030)
Entirely fee based market aka one of bitcoin’s biggest faults/critiques.
It’s actually an interesting argument against hard capped tokenomics.
Tail emissions fix this (ex. Monero).
You'll be dead, dont worry about it.
You get rug pulled
Crash
People will just create a something new and say that one new fancy token equals to some xxxx bitcoin
I'm probably already dead
People move on to the next fad
Fork
You all finally see that it was a scam from the start
There’s no point in mining anymore, blockchain will seize unless it goes to POS. Once the farms stop the gov have a chance to setup enough miners that they control 51% of the network
Everybody switches to XRP
Sorry for maybe a stupid question, but how and who will keep the chain running when miners won’t be able to get rewards anymore?
We'll start to find out in 2-3 more cycles when the security budget starts declining. The first change is that many miners will go out of business start selling their equipment. By 2035-2040, even Bitcoin maxis will have to stop pretending it's no longer an issue.
This is the first cycle where the security budget is slightly lower than at the same point during the previous cycle. Previously, it would jump 100x or 10x every cycle. (Bitcoin may have reached peak security in 2024. If we ignore that brief peak in 2024, the 50-day average peak was in 2021)
https://newhedge.io/bitcoin/block-reward-per-block
Then Algorand will skyrocket!
Should I add the /s or...?
There will still be loads of nodes that will be set up to skim network fees lol.
Does that mean fees will increase drastically?
Yes. The security model of bitcoin relies on a 'we'll cross that bridge when we come to it' method. Well that bridge is almost here and unless the 21 million supply is increased, bitcoin is screwed. Subsequently if it is increased, bitcoin is also screwed.
Not a good news, but thanks.
If you think some redditors are more informed than the people who literally develop the bitcoin code you might want to reassess who you listen to.
If by almost here you mean 120 years or so.
It will become relevant much earlier as it's an exponential decrease of the block reward, not a linear one. 99% will be mined by 2035.
In 20 years, the reward will be 97% smaller, so we should be concerned a lot sooner. The block subsidy
rewardfor the last 80 years will be so small that it's practically already $0.See thats the same thinking the boomers had. "I'll be dead by the time that happens"
I do agree it’s not good but I wouldn’t call more than 100 years “almost here”
No, fees are auction based, meaning they will always be low.
Increased demand for transactions never leads to an increase in supply of transactions because the block space is capped at 1mb.
This means increased demand only leads to a temporary increase in transaction fees.
Since supply never increases, demand can never be above supply for a prolonged period of time. Backlog would build, wait times would increase and demand would naturally be killed off. People aren’t going to wait weeks, months, or an indeterminate period of timefor a transaction to process, regardless if they’ve willing to pay high fees.
This means demand will always be below supply, which means fees will never be high because it’s an auction and users will never have to outbid someone in the long run. Fees can only ever temporarily spike higher before returning to near zero.
Fees are near zero right now, so they will likely go up. This will demand on transaction volume more than than miner revenue though.
For reference, fees are currently less than 0.5sat/vbyte. Basically free.
No, because miners don't meaningfully decide fee rates
The network will become less and less secure until a 51% attack will become extremely cheap. The only way to avoid this is to increase miner rewards.
ppl are buying bitcoin to get rich, then, ppl will mine to get rich. there will be no hash solving reward but opportunity to get your reward by manipulating transactions.
Love how no one is thinking about the fact that energy may just become cheaper
Also love how no one is thinking about the fact energy may become more expensive or bitcoin price will go lower.
Also, I’m pretty sure all anyone contemplates 99 percent of the time is how BTC could go down
Or bitcoin raising in price. Or a combination of both....
Bitcoin rising in price doesn't help here, yes on the one hand it increases the revenue of miners, but at the same time it increases the potential value of a 51% attack to an attacker.
If you think about it, as each halvening reduces the amount of BTC going to miners but does not reduce the total amount of BTC, increasing the price per BTC will always increase the reward to an attacker faster than it increases the security budget.
Said a different way, if the cost to attack the network is now $40B (just as an example) and the marketcap is $1.8T, then next halvening in order to keep the money going to miners constant we need to double the price of BTC. The cost to attack the network then remains $40B, but the marketcap would now be $3.6T, so the risk to reward ratio of an attacker has become twice as enticing!
I’m sure MicroStrategy has been thinking of this. Who else is banking that much
Nodes
They will continue to recieve transaction fees, and the value of those fees continues to move up significantly over time.
If the drop in revenue (in BTC terms) is more than the drop in costs (energy prices continue to go down in BTC terms) then the most inefficient miners will drop out. As they do, the remaining miners earn more revenue. Mining will always be profitable for some.
The miners get tipped for their service.
When bitcoiners decide to make their transaction on the base layer, they pay a tip called a transaction fee to the miners to thank them.
Satoshi designed it as a smaller motor (the block reward) to kickstart a bigger motor (the fees from transactions) so that it could reach a Nash equilibrium where billions of small fees pay for the electricity needed to secure the network from bad actors and be inflation free. To make this possible he designed the Bitcoin blockchain to discard old transactions and not store them forever, but instead only storing the result of validating a transaction and then putting the result in a merkle tree and only storing the outer layers. By doing so you can always check if a transaction was valid by it's hash even if you don't have any other data about the transaction. This design only grows the blockchain by 4.2 MB a year. (and the utxo set some years it will grow in size, other years it will become smaller again)
But after Satoshi left we had our own plans and did nothing to continue implementing the design in code, and the fees becoming unpredictable (not high, just unpredictable) in 2015 and 2016 was enough to make microsoft and steam drop Bitcoin as a currency. Having people bid against each other to be able to make a transaction prevents use as currency.
So the kickstarter motor to incentivize the system to start the bigger motor has never happened.
Bitcoin will most likely get tail emissions making it have inflation again and this will eventually also fail as a store of value.
fun fact: Lightning network transactions could be a billion a day, and miners would make nothing on it.
But there is also hope. It's possible that Bitcoin find adoption with banks and central banks who will start using it to settle transactions between each other. In such a future a Bitcoin transaction would cost more then a 1000 dollars and 99,999% of the population will be priced out from using it and be force to use it through a bank account with zero control over anything. Today banks are already globally doing a 100 settlement transactions a second but with Bitcoin's code only allowing 2 floppy disk worth of transactions to be processed every 10 minutes that's only enough for maybe 20. So if the banks start competiting with each other for that 20 transactions a second, by offering higher and higher fees to the miners then the amount of sats needed for a transactions gets pushed higher and higher. Most people their coins will get locked up forever as you would need more sats to move then you have sats. That's another misconception about Bitcoin. You don't pay per transaction, you pay per utxo. Your 1 BTC might be spread over 200 utxos. So if you try to move 0.5 BTC and you access a 100 utxo's you are paying the price of a normal transaction times a 100. But this is good for Bitcoin as that means the majority of Bitcoin is to spread out over utxo's to over be able to move again, so it can't be sold either! Limiting the supply massively and pushing the price up to insane heights! So you will be rich on paper, but without actually being able to do anything.
BTC: A few transactions paying extremely high fees
BCH: Millions of transactions paying tiny fees
Blockreward is set by coinbase (=mining) and fees. The design is that fees slowly replace the coinbase.
Edit: I forgot one option
Peter Todd: Tail emission, infinit inflation 🤣🤣 Yes he really suggested that.
Millions of transactions will never work because if you read the Bitcoin whitepaper it clearly says that transactions need to be stored forever.
Here it is in point 7.
So there is the math which shows that storage will become a big problem so we need to keep the blocksize as small as a floppy disk and not use Bitcoin to buy coffee with. Because Bitcoin is NOT the money of the internet. And spending it is ridiculous. You don't spend gold. I read all of this in the Bitcoin whitepaper titled "Bitcoin, a store of value to make you richer then gold invented by Adam Back"
Well you had me in the first half....
And an unlimited number of other coins.
Also, as long as people can buy fractions of BTC, it doesn’t seem to matter. Just break the existing supply into smaller fractions.
Each transaction still takes the same resources to process. Diminishing returns
With 0 retail use why should I buy in at this ecosystem where all coins are already gone?
and that is why bitcoin should become more valuable (as long as it’s working)
Yeah Bitcoin will just double in price forever, every 4 years.
2028 $200,000.00
2032 $400,000.00
2036 $800,000.00
2040 $1,600,000.00
2044 $3,200,000.00
2048 $6,400,000.00
2052 $12,800,000.00
2056 $25,600,000.00
2060 $51,200,000.00
2064 $102,400,000.00
2068 $204,800,000.00
2072 $409,600,000.00
2076 $819,200,000.00
2080 $1,638,400,000.00
2084 $3,276,800,000.00
2088 $6,553,600,000.00
2092 $13,107,200,000.00
2096 $26,214,400,000.00
2100 $52,428,800,000.00
So by 2100 one Bitcoin will be worth more then the entire GDP of the USA!
And that's why I hodl.
I am probably going to be mining them with my $39 mining machine I bought off TikTok.
Same here mate, my NM Miner is chugging along, i don't need fancy toys, I'll outlast them all with my primitive tech and unwavering patience 😂
Sounds incredibly profitable lmfao
Won't they just release Bitcoin 2.0 to mine after that?
It's really funny that people think a finite quantity means anything at all.
Guess we will find out in 100+ years.
I doubt it since it’s hard enough to get consensus on issues as the world becomes more fragmented.
Don't need to wait anywhere near that long. We should be able to see the effects 15 years from now.
By then, only 0.1% of the supply will be unmined. The block subsidy will already be so small that the transaction fees will start overtaking the subsidy. In the 100 years between 2040 and 2140, mining rewards will mostly come from transaction fees.
By then, we should be able to tell if Bitcoin can remain secure from 51% attacks if it only costs 0.05% of the total market cap worth of Bitcoin in mining equipment to attack it. Many miners will be quitting the market, so it should be easy for a multi-billionaire to buy up enough to attack the network.
Yep, a big one short changes variable and dilutes BTC/50. Good not a single central bank is buying BTC, they know what their real value is alike gold...
Isn't that Ethereum?
Tokenizing bitcoin onto ethereum would be a way to avoid bitcoin’s security budget deficit while keeping the 21M hard cap.
It doesn't, demand and supply will always adjust to each other.
FAMO
All this energy to mine some internet coin. Fucking nuts
What till you see how much energy is wasted killing eachother.
Isnt this not for a hundred years because the amount of bitcoin received from mining goes down every few years?
A milli
how many coins left to mine does not mean much, there will always be someone willing to sell, at the right price, and everyone has a price. There will always to Davinci and Picaso for sale.
But.. will there be someone willing to buy?
that's gonna take a lot of water.
Wondering what is the estimated power needed to mine what's left available.
That’s a lot, until you realize institutions will keep trying to purchase tens of thousands per week, or day even
Does it make any difference if there is 1m bitcoin to mine or just 200k? As far as i understand its just about knowledge that there are limited supply which is 21m. Unmined btc doesnt matter + it doesnt get mined in our life time anyway.
it does. The chain need miner to keep running. Someone has to input energy with return.
Estimated end date? 2140 oh man gonna be so exciting
BTC is going to be dead before 100 years
Quantum computing is going to come and mine it in one second
How naive
Yep instead of 3 bitcoin every 10 minutes, a powerful quantum computer might be able to mine 30 bitcoins a second!
So those last million bitcoins will be mined in just 10 days after which miners are no longer needed to secure the system.
This is not how it works in reality, but who cares crypto land is make believe anyways. And YES you will get rich!
And you've done research into this and have a thought out and informed theoretical frame work you can explain how this will work and how all work arounds won't scale?
Or are you just repeating a sentence you heard ?
If bitcoin survives that long it will add a tail emission
What's the point of this post?
Maxis gotta maxi
Bots keep posting this nonsense like the rest of the world gives a shit. No one wants to pump your bags.
how long does that take with the current speed
Doesn’t matter, all the paper Bitcoin makes the hard cap irrelevant now.
Dibs
There are only 10k $FIXED coins in existence.
The price is unaware of this fact. Please someone inform the price so it can go up.
Is this ahead of schedule?
No.
And yet it’s going to still take a LONG time with halvings.
I only have two things to say, one a question/opinion and a plain question:
1 - If bitcoin is meant to be used as a currency, wont the "end" of bitcoin mining help stabilize its value and therefore give it more credibility as currency rather than asset?
2 - Since we are "nearing" the end of bitcoin mining, is it a good idea to get some before the day of days arrives?
Bitcoin will never be used as a currency. With 10 minute block times and several confirmations required before your transaction is considered final, you can't really use it for everyday payments. Imagine having to wait 50 minutes after paying for your coffee before you can leave because they have to make sure the transaction doesn't get reverted.
Just one and a bit?
It'll probably get prohibitively expensive to mine before that number hits zero.
Only
I love the idea that all these businesses set up industrial datacenters to mine bitcoin, meanwhile you used to be able to mine it on your cpu on a web page. Once those coins are mined, every 1$ invested in those massive centers is WASTED, poof, just like that
we now know that, big thanks to your post on this very sub that packs 2 of the same visual image except one is slightly cut on the topside 👏🏼🤝🏼👍🏼👍🏼👍🏼
Run
So why is the price 35% less now?
Nobody mentioned this in the thread yet but a 51% attack by double spending from a bad actor probably isn't what would most likely happen if the security drops because there aren't enough profitable miners to mine it.
A more likely scenario is that large state actors would be able to fund the remaining mining companies in large enough numbers to effectively centralize the chain by proxy. "We'll keep you afloat as long as you block certain transactions". Or large state actors spin up their own miners leveraging the states energy infrastructure such that they effectively control a large portion of the network themselves, if they coordinate in this effort they effectively centralize it.
I think the Maxis are going to have to have some tough discussions around how to handle the future of the chain because eventually this will become inevitable, and relatively soon (2-3 more cycles if monetary inflation doesn't keep up).
I think if BTC wants to keep its decentralized network a perpetual small block subsidy prevents the security budget from ever collapsing enough that miners would fall to state actors, or transaction fees get so high that the chain becomes practically unusable for most. But it would slowly inflate the supply. I think this is the best option so far, as long as the inflation is reasonable enough that it doesn't completely negate the scarcity narrative of the coin. We can average the rate of lost coins and use that as a metric baseline for the inflation rate. I think the average joe wouldn't care enough to sway them for/against the coin, and the maxis are not really going to have a choice soon because there aren't any serious alternatives that maintain the value of it while making the coin practically usable and secure. Although I'm open to other ideas.
You can still buy them 24/7 🤪 With no equipment upfront to mine
So early 2026 we will be under 1million
It is insane to think how far we have come
So why would price increase if it did not increase by now? Simple, only because speculators. Sadly for you speculators are short so drill till 44.000$. Thanks for your attention on this matter bagholders.
This is like that meme, where you see the guy and says I’m coming, and he keeps coming for decades but it gives the vibe that he is coming. The last fraction of BTC will be minted in 2140, I’ll be gone by then, my kids will be gone, it’s good to know, but the minting is not as important now, as it is with the price shock. But we GOT to HODL!!!
Everyone talking about quantum computing in here but dont understand how the qubits ACTUALLY work in quantum computing as it applies to cryptography let alone Bitcoin and blockchain ledgers.
As someone who does not know much about crypto. What would happen if it is discovered that you can make more than 21 million bitcoin?
I have no poops to give. Only a million more worthless internet beans. Oh noes!
What do you think gives worth to the US dollar?
Oh look, a disingenuous rhetorical question to which no answer will be acceptable because the person stating it is in a cult! First time I have seen this one today.
Thanks for answering my question, even if indirectly
no worries they will find more
Bitcoin is useless coin it will crash anytime soon
I hope so.. so I can buy some more.