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Comment by iforgetti | Hacker News Reader

What incentive will there be for the community to continue verifying transactions after all the bitcoins are mined?

Is it just that the system of storage will have Ongoing operational cost like a vault has ongoing costs to protect gold?

Has anyone modeled what these costs might look like?

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If the economics of verifying transactions is no longer sustainable, the code will be updated to allow more mining. That's something no one wants to admit, but the SegWit soft fork confirmed the influence concentrated miners have on development. The idea that somehow Bitcoin just works outside of any social influence is a complete fallacy.

Exactly. Miners will decide to continue mining. Probably in just the right amount such that inflation/deflation is controlled enough to create sustained profits for them. Thus basically acting like a central bank.

True, and honestly this can happen before they even get near the mining cap, since computational costs will likely be unsustainable before that.

> What incentive will there be for the community to continue verifying transactions after all the bitcoins are mined?

How are these questions still being asked, and more amazingly, still being upvoted? First off, there will not be a time when "all the bitcoins are mined". Mining rewards are on a geometric curve that approaches 21 million but never touches it. Second, transaction fees also go to miners, so even when mining emissions are negligible, transaction fees will keep the miners incentivized to keep mining.

This is all pretty much in the intro of the whitepaper, and the first thing you should learn if you spend 5 minutes looking into this technology.

Honest question: if there is little transactions because it's a "store of value", and if the mining reward continuously go down, why would anyone be incenticized to be a miner?

> How are these questions still being asked, and more amazingly, still being upvoted? First off, there will not be a time when "all the bitcoins are mined". Mining rewards are on a geometric curve that approaches 21 million but never touches it.

These questions are still being asked because people like you still spout the wrong answers. There will be a time when "all the bitcoins are mined" - its in the source[0].

[0]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/blob/master/src/validatio...

Currently, miners get the block reward plus transaction fees. Miners get to pick which transactions to include in the blocks they are processing, so of course they only include the ones with highest fees. Once there is no more block rewards, they would would have to survive off transaction fees alone.

I suspect transaction costs will rise when that's the only gain

there's still a fee for just verifying transactions.

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