[justinreeves]

>> What happens when the value of a coin is less than the mining costs or ledger maintenance?

> There are transaction fees that go to the block miner.

The issue here is that they go to the person who mined the block originally, but they aren't passed on to those who are simply running the client to maintain the ledger. With the increased difficulty in mining, it's very unlikely for anyone without a large investment in hardware, that you're ever going to make money on the fees. It provides no incentive to run the full client to help the network confirm transactions.

[sirsar]

You are mostly correct, but I'd like to make some clarifications.

>they aren't passed on to those who are simply running the client to maintain the ledger.

The word "maintain" is ambiguous here. When I run bitcoin-qt on my computer, I have the whole blockchain locally, and I relay blocks created by others, but I do not "maintain" the blockchain in the sense of adding or subtracting from it beyond the transactions I create myself to spend my own money.

>With the increased difficulty in mining, it's very unlikely for anyone without a large investment in hardware, that you're ever going to make money on the fees.

Correct, so I don't mine.

>It provides no incentive to run the full client to help the network confirm transactions.

Again, "help" is a bit ambiguous. When I run bitcoin-qt, I relay transactions, but I do not contribute any processing power to confirmations. "Confirming" a transaction means including it in a block, an d only miners create blocks.

Now, it is a bit of a problem that there is little to no incentive to run a validating client, i.e. one that accepts transactions, verifies that they are cryptographically and monetarily valid, and passes them on to other people. We shall see if another cryptocoin solves this issue.

[justinreeves]

Thanks for that, I was struggling for the right words when I was writing the post.

I would really like to see another crypto currency come out that addressed the validating client issue. I think that could also get more people interested in it too, since they would be earning money just by running the client.

[rcxdude]

The miners are the ones who are maintaining the ledger. People just running the client and downloading the full blockchain are basically just duplicating the data (or using it to verify the full history for themselves), and maybe providing some bandwidth to others who want to do the same thing, they don't contribute to the transactions in any way.