This may be bitcoin 101 that I just missed but it would be great if someone could flush out some justification to what Friedcst said about transaction fees becoming a bigger part of the reward for mining a block. Why is it that this will happen? 15 btc per block seems like a lot in fees. What sort of fee per transaction would that equate to?
We're doing a lot of extrapolation here since the number of BTC issued per block isn't set to halve again until ~ 2017. At today's transaction amounts - aka 50K transactions per day or about 350 transactions per block this would be about .04 BTC per transaction. However, we have to presume that the number of BTC transactions will significantly increase as BTC gains more popularity. Anyone want to take a guess about how many transactions per block in 2-3 years?
Do we have any idea what portion if transaction fees AM is currently collecting on each block in addition to the created btc?
A related question is how is btc designed to continue after all block have been solved? I know this is decades away but I'm curious if this isn't a problem to worry about or if this is something that will be solved eventually.
I guess I'm thinking that since the amount of rewarded btc for every block halves eventually the reward for solving a block wil be .00001 btc and miner will continue because they will be paid a transaction fee. If that's the case then eventually the transaction fees might be a decent percentage of a regular transaction. Seems a little worrisome in the long term to a currency that has a major advantage because of low transaction fees.