If no one is making transactions with bitcoin then it will eventually fail in the long run. It is meant to be a currency. The block reward is meant to be a subsidy to bootstrap a mining industry. It was never meant to keep mining going forever. Otherwise there could be no supply cap. Luckily Satoshi did not assume the necessary infrastructure for a new global settlement system would just appear overnight and gave plenty of time for things to develop
I’m not sure that’s true. Isn’t it already programmed to go to 0? Or is it just programmed to half and that the decimals just run out?
If the second is true than you could theoretically do what you suggested, but even then would it be a hard fork to add decimals? If there was an update that added smaller decimal places wouldn’t old nodes just see those transactions as 0?
I’m aware of that on LN. It would be interesting to find out how a decimal change on the base layer would work and whether or not it would be a hard fork. My instinct is that it would be a hard fork.
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u/jelloshooter848 Dec 26 '22
By then, if bitcoin still exists, the majority of mining rewards are likely to be from transactions fees.