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Comment by wsc981 | Hacker News Reader

Maybe not necessarily the Bitcoin community, but other cryptos are figuring other solutions to fix this problem. One of these solutions is the Proof of Stake [0] instead of Bitcoin's Proof of Work.

Perhaps after all Bitcoin coins have been mined (currently around 17.000.000 mined, 21.000.0000 total IIRC), not much energy would be needed afterwards, for Bitcoin at least?

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof-of-stake

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> Perhaps after all Bitcoin coins have been mined, not much energy would be needed afterwards, for Bitcoin at least?

Nope, "mining", which is proof-of-work solving, is needed as long as Bitcoin is used, even after coin generation is complete.

But the competition may lower, if the reward they get drops.

One theory for what happens when the reward drops (i.e. no new bitcoins are rewareded anymore) is that the already high fees will further increase. If that is not the case, the competition will lower and Bitcoin will become unsafer because it is backed by less mining power.

For some blocks I checked a week ago the transaction fees amounted for approx. 1/3 of the reward. Like, 12.5btc of newly generated coins and 6btc of fees. Although, to compensate for the next reward halving the fees would need to go further up, and they already aren't acceptable for smaller transactions.

But this is a problem (the high fees) that should be solved by the Lightning Network [0].

From what I understand this will bundle many smaller transactions into 1 big transaction or something like that. This should happen off-chain therefore small transactions will be quicker and cheaper.

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[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lightning_Network

Coin generation will never be complete, it will slow down infinitely.

This would only be true if bitcoin were infinitely divisible.

In actuality the block reward will eventually be one 'satoshi' (one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin); then, when it's next due to be halved, dividing by 2 with a fixed precision of 8 decimal places will take the reward down to a value of zero.

See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Controlled_supply#Projected_Bitco... for a table of rewards.

Note that it is possible, by consensus, for the satoshi to become divisible, though I can’t see it becoming infinitely divisible. (From that page: “The total number of bitcoins, as mentioned earlier, has an asymptote at 21 million, due to a technical limitation in the data structure of the blockchain - specifically the integer storage type of the transaction output, this exact value would have been 20,999,999.9769 bitcoin. Should this technical limitation be adjusted by changing the width of the field, the total number will still only approach or be a maximum of 21 million.”)

This is true, but you can view it as effectively stopped if you get only a very small reward.

This is especially interesting because the number of generated coins is not totally depended on the value (in USD) of bitcoin. This means that you could get a converted reward of just a few dollars in a few decades.

Either fees have to rise or Bitcoin will be much unsafer by then.

You forgot to add mining difficulty in the mix. If you'll get just a few dollars, you also spent just a few dollars on mining the block.

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