Quote from: Betwrong on July 18, 2016, 11:26:50 AM

Quote from: deisik on July 10, 2016, 08:23:24 AM

Quote from: ekissane on July 10, 2016, 08:12:53 AM

99.21875% will be mined in 20 years time. If electricity isn't very cheap by then and/or if bitcoin isn't worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, it's hard to imagine anybody wanting to mine then. How will transactions then be verified?

Miners falling off would mean decreasing difficulty, so that shouldn't be a problem over a long enough time frame (i.e. difficulty matching up with the decreased hash rate). Besides, it is assumed that after almost all coins are mined, miners will earn by collecting transaction fees...

What actually happens then is hard to predict, though

That's what I like in this game - the less people left the more they win, so it's impossible to stop it. And yes, if Bitcoin will be used by many (and it definitely will be) the amount of the transaction fees will be huge.

It all depends. For example, it depends on the block size. If it gets increased, the transaction fees may decline (as far as I understand it). Further, more people using Bitcoin doesn't necessarily mean the growth in fees revenue flow either, since the latter primarily depends on the number of transactions, not the number of people transacting...

Though I agree that there should be some positive correlation between the former (number of transactions) and the latter (number of people transacting)