Quote:
Originally Posted by afc wimbledon
legit Question for dino or psycnet
If bitcoin is capped at 21 million and so mining will cease when the 21 million is reached, or sooner if there is less and less 'pay' for the effort involved
Then how does the blockchain operate without the miners?
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The Decentralized Mecca that Bitcoin has positioned itself as will be shattered, and they will either a) raise the minting cap to incentivize miners to continue or b) fork into a new network to do some similar voodoo.
A good example of a chain doing this when they hit their minting cap recently is Polygon.
Polygon originally had a token cap of 10B, but they were set to hit that in late 2023. At that point, Validators (basically miners on a PoS chain, though typically working more collaboratively and expending magnitudes less energy) would no longer receive processing rewards beyond a cut of transaction gas (which is minimal compared to "emissions").
So, Polygon upgraded their MATIC token (network used to be called MATIC) to the POL token, which no longer has a cap, and sees an inflation rate of ~2% a year as a result Validator emissions. There's a burn mechanism on most EVMs as well (EIP-1559) but that does not entirely offset the inflation.