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by 153791098c
2361 days ago
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Nothing changes except for the missing block reward. At the moment mining a block on BTC will net you about $100K (block reward + fees). If BTC wants to keep the same (relative) security as it has now while having no block reward, the transaction fees have to cover the $100K. With the current 7tps (at most) limit that will have to amount to about $24 per transaction when the blocks are 100% full all the time. If people aren't willing to pay that transaction fee or use an alternative (cheaper) cryptocurrency, the security of the BTC chain will plummet. |
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Nitpick here, but what will happen is that the cost of mining blocks will outweigh the revenue of selling its fees. This means that miners will at some point decide to stop mining bitcoin. If this happens abruptly, that would cripple the network for a while, since the difficulty adjustment function would not be able to adjust the difficulty in time. If the move is not sudden, but a progression over months/years/decades, that wouldn't cripple bitcoin.
If miners stop mining bitcoin, that doesn't immediately make bitcoin less secure. The hardware might be used to mine other chains, or could just be binned. If a single entity wanted to perform a 51% attack, she/he would need to buy up a lot of discarded hardware without notice.
A reduction of global hash power isn't a security issue per se; it is a multi-variable problem.