What Happens When There Are No More Bitcoin To Mine?

Bitcoin's blockchain protocol makes mining more difficult as more miners join the pool, and the Bitcoin reward for mining a block also halves every 210,000 blocks.

It's taken just 9 years to mine 80 percent of the total Bitcoin that will ever be available, in a little over 520,000 blocks, as shown in the graph below.

Currently, miners are still heavily incentivized to mine in order to obtain increasingly more valuable Bitcoin tokens as a reward before the supply reaches its capacity.

When the day comes that the 21 mln cap is hit, there will be no more BTC rewards for miners.

Transactions still need to be validated and stored on blocks in the blockchain - so miners will only benefit from transaction fees.

As it stands, Bitcoin transactions are processed by the network in order of the transaction fee associated to that specific transaction.

At the time, the limit was more than big enough due to the small amount of transactions and the fact that a change could be implemented at a later stage - if need be.

Segwit was eventually implemented in Aug. 2017, as major stakeholders from the largest mining pools and Bitcoin companies pushed for a solution to high transactions fees caused by a backlog due to the block size limit.

In essence, users deposit Bitcoin into this channel and make transactions by transferring promise of ownership to each other.

Once all 21 mln Bitcoin have been mined, transaction fees will be the only incentive for miners.