Here's a good question for bitcoin price: what happens next year at block 210000?
Why would that matter?
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_bitcoin_works
Particularly,
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First, the block producer gets a bounty of some number of bitcoins, which is agreed-upon by the network. (Currently this bounty is 50 bitcoins; this value will halve every 210,000 blocks.)
Which is the reason there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins, it's a mathematical series that infinitely approaches 21 million. If you halve the amount produced after every 210,000 blocks, you know after the first 210,000 you will have half of everything that will ever be available, which is (210000*50) = 10.5 million btc. Not sure exactly how it is programmed, but this either means at some point new blocks will produce the smallest decimal allowed by the language it is written in, or they will produce zero new bitcoins, and profits from mining will come 100% from transaction fees. By that point, well beyond any of our life expectancies, bitcoin will most likely be long dead, though. Or insanely popular, in which case my grandkids will be -rich-.
