WHAT HAPPEN WHEN ALL BTCs ARE MINED?

[abappale]

Experts say there are only 21,000,000 bitcoins (BTCs) out there to be mined and now above 16,000,000 are already mined. My questions here are how long is it going to take the world of miners (antpool & cos.) to finish the job and what will happen if there are no btcs to be mined. I am a newbie in the world of cryptos therefore pardon me if this seems to be silly.

[Chris]

We can't predict when the last btc will be mined, it's based on the hashing power, hashing power is not static to day is 4,265,775,241 GH/s tomorrow can be 5,265,775,241 GH/s or can be down, after the last Bitcoin mined, mines will still keep mining the block reward will be 0, miners need an incentive to keep mining this incentive will be the transaction fees, if mines abandon mining Bitcoin will become insecure

[davidmccoy]

Bitcoin mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions or blockchain. The 21 Million is the cap limit. But that will have no effect on the performance of Bitcoin, it already has 100000 units. So transactions will become smaller and we are already witnessing the BTC transactions in fractions.

[Possum577]

You asked how long it may take to mine them all. They may never all get mined (so I here), but the general consensus is that last of it will be mined in the 2100s. (that's next century).

Since the miner's block rewards will decrease as more are mined (google "Bitcoin halving" for more detail), it's assumed that transaction fees will rise. This should be OK because the finite supply of Bitcoin supports the inflation of its value (compared to fiat currency). But as you'll read about on this forum and elsewhere, people are already bitching about transaction fees.