It is all clear. The question is how to attract miners when there is no block reward (or it becomes too small after several halvings) and the transaction fees are not high enough to engage them in mining so that they are in profit (currently they are relatively small).
there will still be a "reward" (payment to miners)
but not from the protocols native supply creation..
the "reward" is an amount of coin in the first transaction of a block that goes to an address set by a mining pool manager.
the reward(payment to miners) however is a combination of the "block reward" of supply creation protocol + total fee's
conversationally when the "block reward" word is used, people are commonly speaking in a simplified way of the supply creation.. and not the "total reward for mining pool" which includes the fee "reward" ('reward' vs 'block reward' word jargon difference)
.. yes its confusing in human speak, but its a throw-back to the early days when blockreward was 100% supply creation with no fee's, so comonly spoken of as jsut the supply creation protocol amount
but when the supply creation becomes zero the 'total reward for miners' that is the total amount that goes into the address of the first transaction of a block would be 100% fee's + zero supply creation amount
in the future(2140+) the common speak of "blockreward" will be of the fees alone
as for "transaction fees not enough" question
bitcoin will either be highly popular with lots of transactions paying reasonable fee's each, to combine to a sufficient total for lots of miners to collectively work in a mining pool, or it has lost popularity and doesnt need as much miners mining to secure a unpopular network (should some other network or monetary system become popular in the world)
yep if the total amount of payment to miners is not enough, less miners will compete. meaning the hashrate would change with less miners mining
also the market rate of exchange to fiat also caters and changes to make a set of sats worthy or not to mine
I do understand the binary math; probably, I haven't correctly expressed myself. The question was whether (1) the networks eternally continue trying to remove another bit and distribute zero reward or (2) it has some condition like "if after halving procedure block reward=0 then stop sending block reward and stop halving procedure"?
imagine it more like this in conversational form
where by currently protocol supply creation is 312500000sat
where by currently lets say total fee is 2000tx paying ~250sats each, total fee is 500000sat
first transaction(block reward) destination amount = protocol supply creation(312,500,000sat) + total fee(500,000sat)
first transaction(block reward) destination amount = 31300000sat
in 120 years
first transaction(block reward) destination amount = protocol supply creation(0sat) + total fee(lets say 30,000,000sat)
first transaction(block reward) destination amount = 30000000sat
which the market rate of exchange to fiat would see 2140's: 30000000sat being worth more $$ than 2025's: 31300000sat
..
after 2140the developers of the time can then update the node/software people use to no longer do any sanity check of the supply creation protocol(no longer required code) and just have pure fee total calculation check code for what goes into the first transaction of a block
