1. Increase total Bitcoin supply would violate principle of Bitcoin. See https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Principles_of_Bitcoin.
2. Bitcoin decentralized is major reason it's so successful. Otherwise, it'd be seized just like Liberty Reserve.
3. Default minrelaytxfee value haven't changed in decade, despite Bitcoin price have raised a lot since then. I doubt the community would agree to increase the default value.

It depends on the price of the computing power, which is hard to predict in the long term. Besides, this number can vary significantly for different miners. I'm rather trying to imagine what could keep miners engaged if the rewards become too small.

How much is too small? That is an important unknown. I don't think anyone has figured out the minimum necessary value or how to determine it.

But I guess we don't need to know the minimum value in order to think about what might happen if the block reward goes below it.

There are several examples of 51% attacks on other coins. In most cases of a sustained 51% attack, the coins died. However, there were multiple successful double-spends on Ethereum Classic, and that coin is still around. There was also a sustained 51% DOS attack on Bitcoin Cash and that coin has survived.

You are forgetting that the value of each bitcoin rewarded tends to go much higher after every halving.

So even if the number of bitcoin that is rewarded to the miners is cut in half, the value of each bitcoin is worth at least twice as much than before,
so the miners aren't really losing anything. They are actually earning more as a result of the halving, due to this price appreciation.

Also, as adoption increases which naturally occurs as the price of bitcoin goes up, so does the volume of transactions and fees.
More people using the network means more fees collected by the miners.

first lesson of bitcoin, there are NO BTC in the blockchain. no BTC in the block reward
all units of measure are hard coded as sats in the protocol.. and then using the app/explorers display to do math to display it in a nicer way in btc form

the initial reward of 2009 was 5000000000sats which for visual display, comfort of conversation and common money recognition is represented as 50btc. yep the 50btc reward is just GUI display of the wallet and not hard coded in the protocol

yep in the blockchain, you wont find the first 4 year cycle of rewards being 110010 (50)

this 5000000000 is actually in binary
100101010000001011111001000000000
to get to 2500000000 (25btc) in binary is simple. you just remove the suffix bit
10010101000000101111100100000000
to get to 1250000000 (12.5btc) in binary is simple. you just remove the suffix bit
1001010100000010111110010000000

yep each halving is just 1 bit less of the reward which the translates binary to decimal to a number you can recognise
the very last halving is where the final 1bit becomes 0

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as for incentive for miners
miners do not pay their electric in sats. they pay electric bills in native countries fiat £$¥€
and so the market price exchange rate deflates(multiplies) the amount of fiat you get for a set amount of sats/btc

this market deflation aspect is ample to cater and look after miners for several decades without the need for transaction fee's to be significant bonus/replacement

however by the time several decades have passed the ignorant dev-politics of those governing the protocol would realise that technology capabilities grow, and they will allow there to be more utility of a block to add more transactions and thus more people making transactions at a reasonable fee each, to equate to a high enough total fee to be of significant replacement for the blockreward

but this kinda stuff is not something you need to worry about in your lifetime, but a interesting discussion you might want to make your great grandkids aware of for when they grow up

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as for your bitcoin bus analogy of the article
right now the bitcoin bus is self funded by generating its own income(blockreward) later on the passengers(transactions) will buy bus tickets(fee) to ride the bus when the bus is not sufficiently self funding itself

.. i understand your a newbie so i wont rip apart your other errors i found in your article, but enjoy learning about bitcoin. there is much to learn

You have to know that Bitcoin miners' rewards have to sources: Bitcoin block subsidy, and Bitcoin transaction fee.

• Only thing we are sure is, Bitcoin block subsidy will become less with time, after every 210,000 blocks or about every 4 years.
• Bitcoin transaction fee, in average, for future Bitcoin blocks can be higher or smaller than now.

It's purely about rewards of Bitcoin miners in BTC, but is mining profitable for Bitcoin miners or not, it will depend on their input cost and output revenue that depends on Bitcoin price in future too.

• Controlled supply
• Equivalent network time
• To mine same 1 BTC, Bitcoin miners will have to spend more inputs in future because of Bitcoin block subsidy halvings, and more competitiveness among Bitcoin mining pools and Bitcoin miners.

Tell me what will the price be by the end of today? How about by the end of this week or month? You can't, can you?

Similarly you can't really speculate on Bitcoin's security regarding miners. When bitcoin started, miners were earning 50 bitcoins per block but that was barely worth 50 bucks. Today they are earning 3 bitcoins per block (3.125 to be exact) but it is worth $300,000.

My point is that just like people back in 2009-2010 could neither foresee nor believe some day miners would be earning $300k with 3BTC reward, we can't really predict what things are going to be like 10 years from now when reward is smaller or 100 years from now when the reward is zero.

This is a problem for the future to solve because it depends on a lot of things. I personally believe by that time bitcoin has either will have ceased to exist or significantly changed and will not be anything like it is today.

If everyone can predict price of Bitcoin correctly, everyone would have become billionaires now, 16 years since Bitcoin Genesis Block in January 2009. The fact is not everyone are millionaires or billionaires from Bitcoin mining or investment since 2009, this means people mostly made bad and inaccurate price predictions.

They failed in the past, and will continue to fail in future with price predictions.

In financial market, as the saying goes "Don't time in the market" and it is applicable with Bitcoin market too as history proves it is good advice.

The cost of mining is primarily determined by the value of the block reward (i.e. subsidy plus fees) because of the difficulty adjustment and the economics of mining. It is not related to technology or energy prices.


That's an odd question. First, the network isn't programmed; each node in the network is programmed. Second, whether a node's software divides 0 by 2 to get 0 or it just says 0 is irrelevant because both agree that the correct amount is 0. BTW, Bitcoin Core for example, continues to divide 0 by 2 for many halvings and then at some point it stops and just says 0.