This morning I was talking about this with a buddy of mine.
Right now we have miners all over the world trying to solve this exponentially hard algorithm to earn their bitcoins. That is their incentive and that is what drives them to do so.
What happens when we remove that incentive to "mine" aka "verify transactions" on the blockchain? What I'm basically asking is what happens when we hit 21,000,000 bitcoins from the perspective of the miners?
Don't forget the transaction fees which miners also get. These days, for example, miners get around $2 million in transaction fees
daily. Miners will always have a good reason to mine, because the reward is pretty big.
Also don't forget that we are talking about things here which won't happen during our lifetime. The last Bitcoins will be mined in 21102140.