Swift,
Here's another aspect:
Lets imagine that there are no transaction fees in 2040. At that time, there should be strong Bitcoin banks and other financial institutions. These institution will have every reason to run miner to keep the integrity of their own transactions and to make sure that deposits are safe from attack. If I'm not mistaken, miners can pick and choose which transactions to include in a block. I believe Mt Gox runs miners to speed verification of transaction. Mining helps bitcoin financial institutions even without transaction fees or rewards from new blocks; The incentive already exists.
Here's another aspect:
Lets imagine that there are no transaction fees in 2040. At that time, there should be strong Bitcoin banks and other financial institutions. These institution will have every reason to run miner to keep the integrity of their own transactions and to make sure that deposits are safe from attack. If I'm not mistaken, miners can pick and choose which transactions to include in a block. I believe Mt Gox runs miners to speed verification of transaction. Mining helps bitcoin financial institutions even without transaction fees or rewards from new blocks; The incentive already exists.
Yes! Finally someone who gets it! I've been trying to highlight this for months. Many of the intelligent forum members don't equate mining to a strong bank vault or other security measures.
I pointed this out in another thread (or maybe this one, can't remember), and it doesn't just apply to bankers. It also applies to financial investment firms, because they can choose to accept their OWN transactions into the block without a fee, thus significantly reducing their cost overhead for investing in stocks and other such things that I don't have a head for.
I have pointed this theme out in other threads as the "Wal-Mart" perspective. When the day comes that either Wal-MArt or one of it's major competitors starts accepting bitcoins, Wal-mart (and competitors) will have an outsized interest in timely processing of free transactions (for themselves not their competitors) so Wal-Mart might fund a mining cluster (they already have partially funded a datacenter) while smaller competitors such as Target would likely contract out to a major mining company to process their customers' transactions for free, so that they don't have to wait for free transactions to process on the open network nor ask their customers to pay a transaction fee. Wal-Mart doesn't need a 'financial institution', they are the financial institution.