Contents:
The debate on how miners will fare on after the 21 million Bitcoins have been mined has been going on in the crypto space for quite some time now. With the exhaustion of the Bitcoin reserves, miners will lose their block rewards and will need to resort to other ways of earning with bitcoin. The question of whether mining will still be a profitable venture has had critics harp on the future of miners.
With no more block rewards, miners will have to rely on transaction fees to keep themselves financially afloat. Bear with me here, even as of now, mining Bitcoin is ridiculously expensive due to the high cost of specialized, high-powered machinery besides power.
And with the next bitcoin halving event set to occur in less than a year, block rewards will be cut by half 6. Initially, the reward for mining a block was 50 Bitcoins, then it dropped to 25 Bitcoins in , then dropped again to In , the reward of mining Bitcoin will be 6.
The overall effect is that the transaction fees may be too little to keep miners afloat and therefore will be forced out of business especially if they are small scale miners. Nonetheless, this may not be the case scenario due to several well-speculated reasons. First, with the rapid advancement in technology witnessed over the past century, the coming years could see significant progress in mining technology. A dedicated small and affordable mining chip would be invented, thus substantially lowering the cost of mining and in turn, increasing profitability.
Additionally, mining hardware would be energy efficient, significantly cutting on extreme energy expenses and increasing revenue.
Specialized mining hardware such as application-specific integrated circuits ASICs has already been developed to simplify the mining process as discussed below. In the second possible case scenario, the transaction fees could rise to a level sufficient to keep miners financially afloat.
With the exhaustion of the bitcoin reserves, the supply will decrease, coupled with an increase in demand. Bitcoin will gain a substantial value, and the transaction cost may just be enough for miners to survive. ASICs have been developed specifically to mine bitcoin and are very effective.
In , it halved again to Another possibility on the cards is that the reward mechanism for Bitcoin could change some time before the final block is mined. First, with the rapid advancement in technology witnessed over the past century, the coming years could see significant progress in mining technology. All miners are nodes but not all nodes are miners. The exhaustion of Bitcoin reserves will mean miners will solely earn through transactions fees instead of block rewards. That means transaction fees currently make up as little as 6. What will happen when the global supply of bitcoin reaches its limit?
Bitcoin mining is an intensively competitive activity, and its difficulty increases over time. Mining nodes compete with each other to be the first to complete a block transaction and add it to the growing block. You, therefore, need a dedicated bitcoin mining hardware, ASICs to stay ahead of the competition.
Currently, close to This means that close to 3. The actual bitcoin in circulation is way below the The last bitcoin is expected to be mined in , where the block reward would be below 1 Satoshi. The question of BTC price is of great concern to most miners.
Will the price of bitcoin increase or decrease? SegWit Segregated Witness refers to a protocol upgrade that involves increasing the block size limit on a blockchain by removing signature data from bitcoin transactions. SegWit code was released in but implemented on Bitcoin in August The primary function of SegWit is to separate non-signature data from signature data on each transaction, thus reducing transaction sizes stored on a block.
It takes some work to extract.
The difference, of course, is that Bitcoins are mined through computational means rather than being physically dug out of the earth. Miners do not "create" any new Bitcoins, even if it seems like they do. In reality, Satoshi Nakamoto issued all 21 million Bitcoins when he launched Bitcoin in January The actual role of a miner is to secure the network and process Bitcoin transactions. Every 10 minutes a successful miner discovers a new block by solving a cryptographic puzzle and is allowed to add it to the Bitcoin blockchain.
Blocks work as ledgers and are filled with Bitcoin transactions waiting to be processed. For this service, miners get automatically paid in the form of fresh Bitcoins and transaction fees. In the release announcement of Bitcoin V. The release announcement stipulated the rate at which miners would be awarded Bitcoins for their work, stating that the said rate would be halved every four years until all Bitcoins were mined.
When Bitcoin was launched, miners gained a reward of 50 Bitcoin for every newly discovered block.
This was halved to 25 Bitcoins in and again to As of , miners gain 6. As we already mentioned, it said that once the supply ran dry, the reward system could be replaced by transaction fees. Miners already collect rewards in the form of transaction fees as well as Bitcoins.
Unfortunately, for many of us, the year is too far in the future, so we'll never know what happens at the moment the last Bitcoin is mined. Given the proactive and passionate Bitcoin community, you'd imagine a strong replacement will already be in place, most likely in the form of a revised transaction fee process as above. Confused about Bitcoin and cryptocoins?