This might have been answered elsewhere but couldn't find it, if it has.
The miners get paid less and less as time goes on.
With the ledger also growing bigger and bigger, wouldn't the cost of mining start to exceed the profitability of mining? If no one would mine bitcoins anymore, wouldn't it shut the whole system down?
I don’t really know about this, although they say that things got really tough for miners, but I think it only got tough for those who are individual miners. At first, anyone can mine Bitcoin, as long as you have your computer and a miner you can mine Bitcoin anywhere, but this time around you can’t mine it yourself, you will have to join a pool to be able to profit from it.
It is no longer as easy as it used to be from the start for individual miners, but there are still big companies that mine it and they have everything that’s needed to mine Bitcoin and they are profiting from it I believe. And though the reward is being halved, the worth still increases, which means they are definitely gaining from it.