Had a thought, today. From my limited knowledge of mining, one of the primary reasons people participate is to acquire new BTC. These miners process the transactions that keep the Bitcoin network operational.
I know there will come a day some time into the future when the last bit coin will be mined...what happens after that? Will the number of miners decrease drastically? Will the average fee per transaction increase in order to get coins through in a reasonable amount of time? Will this have the potential to affect the stability, even the reliability, of the currency?
I am very interested to hear what solutions have been proposed for these possibilities.