Revamping Bitcoin's Future: Rethinking Blockchain Rewards

At some point, block rewards are gonna dwindle. Miners might bail on BTC, and that could crash the value. I’m throwing out an idea about revamping the blockchain, maybe around 2068. If we can boost donations while BTC's under 100k, it might help keep things running beyond 2068. Gonna refine this more, but here's a poll and I’d love your thoughts.

so... rounding problems? Yeah, they're kinda there, but let’s focus on the big picture. So, by 2028 we’re looking at 1.5625 BTC per block... if we keep efficiency steady, miners need BTC to hit around 200k to stick around. Possible, right? By 2032, it’s down to 0.78125... then 400k each. Then in 2036? 0.390625 and 800k. It’s wild.

I get what you’re saying about the mining rewards needing to be high enough. But dude, this kinda messes with Bitcoin’s immutability. Hard forks usually don’t sit well with the community. If we change the supply, it’s not just a minor tweak. Who decides how much to take? What happens with dormant coins?

You make fair points, but Bitcoin's already built to shift from block rewards to a fee-driven system. So low rewards don’t mean miners will ditch it as long as people want block space. Using genesis coins to raise rewards feels like it would break immutability and consensus.

Fees? Nah, that’s just a bad take. Who’s paying 100 sats for a transaction when BTC’s at 10 million? The total supply is still 21 million coins. Just changing how fast they disappear... No new coins, no recalls, except maybe the genesis ones. Honestly, I see us heading for a cliff around 2048-2056.

I kinda see BTC becoming like gold... pretty centralized. Big firms are gonna hold a lot of it, making it scarce as prices go up. But what happens to the P2P aspect? People might start treating BTC like some high-value NFT. Mining's only in trouble if transaction volume drops drastically. I’m not super worried about that.

Totally hear you, the 50 BTC from the genesis block is a special case, but what about the donations? Those 50 coins weren’t coded to be different, so they’re part of the 21 million cap. But I think we should keep those burned coins as a tribute.

I’m turning 69 soon. Honestly, I don’t have family to pass my coins to. So I see concerns about the cliff way differently than someone younger. Fees could bring average costs to about 0.01 BTC in 2056, maybe even 0.02. But... 2068? Those rewards drop to 0.0015, and if fees don’t cover it... what then?

This idea seems to need a hard fork and updates across nodes & wallets. Those 50 BTC from Genesis were never part of the UTXO set.

Satoshi left those 50 coins unspendable for a reason. They’re unallocated but still count in the 21 million cap. If we reissue mining rewards, that could seriously mess with the whole system. Wouldn’t it?

Rounding isn’t really an issue when we talk halvings. It’s a straight-up binary halving, so no fractions pop up. Bitcoin only deals with whole Satoshis anyway, so it all stays clean.