What Happens To Bitcoin Miners ⛏️⚡️ When The Last SAT Is Mined? With ‪@TatumTurnUp‬ | The Check In

welcome back to the checkin my name is Jared and today I am here back with Tatum Tatum was recently on the compass mining podcast I'm going to leave that link above if you're on YouTube and I'll also leave it below in the description if you are listening to this on a podcast platform Tatum how are you I am doing fantastic I am out on the field today making sure Bitcoin still works and good news it does I'm glad someone's checking to make sure the network is still up and running and you know before we hopped on I asked you if you were in a truck and you said you were so if you wouldn't mind could you hit the horn okay perfect so if you're on a podcast platform this is pro everyone's looking at me now sorry just if you're on a podcast platform that was proofed that Tatum is actually in the field in a truck recording this thank you for coming on the check-in the question we want to approach today and just talk about is something that I think we're going to have to hypothesize a little bit I know we have some theoretical understanding of maybe what's going to happen at the protocol level but for miners the question is and this is just a question in general that people have when they get into Bitcoin it's one of uber curiosity because unfortunately anyone listening to this today is likely not going to be around when this becomes a thing um but if you could talk about what is going to happen for Bitcoin Miners and the overall Bitcoin Network when the last block is mined yeah so there's a lot to think about when you when you think about the block reward from a minor perspective and uh just to clarify so the reward currently is made up of the subsidy which is the programmatic quote unquote new Bitcoins the coin based transaction that are mined um whenever blocks are found then you also have the transaction fees and those together transaction fees plus subsidy equals total reward so um you see a lot of variations with that uh as Cycles go on like right after the having we saw some of the biggest block rewards ever because uh we we saw people trying to get the quote unquote rare sads which we're not going to go into all that but I mean that that drove up fees for for for a little bit like I mean there were some there were some blocks that had 21 Bitcoin rewards and that was right after the subsidy have from 6.25 to 3.125 um and so you have to look at that where you you have a fee Market already um and we've only seen very few blocks where the fees were actually higher than the subsidy uh and as we get closer to the last Bitcoin being mined in I think around year 2140 we're going to see that margin between uh the transaction fees and the block reward or I guess vice versa the block reward and transaction fees get smaller and smaller um until it's going to start they're going to start fighting with each other on what takes up more of the actual block reward what's weird to think about though is how the price of Bitcoin is going to affect what that margin looks like because right now we just effectively miners revenue is denominated in Bitcoin so after the having on April 19th Bitcoin miners Revenue was cut in half basically because they were going from making and this is generalization they were going from making 6.25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes to 3.125 bitcoin every 10 minutes immediately that's just how it works that's the protocol um but you look back and uh people miners were making 50 Bitcoin every 10 minutes and then 25 Bitcoin every 10 minutes and you can go back and look at what the price was back whenever uh we were in those epochs but you got to look in the it fast forward what are what is the price of Bitcoin going to do to those somewhat I guess you could say minuscule transaction fees are those going to take up you know the the sustainability and the profitability of mining as the price of Bitcoin gets higher also is the competition for the mle going to remain where it is now we're we're not emptying the mle fees are still relatively low floating around you know between three and 10 SATs for Vite average every time I've checked uh and we'll see spikes every now and again with uh different l2s coming up and and uh different ordinal projects and we'll see those fees Spike uh I remember right after the having I saw fees that were in the I want to say 100 STS for per bite or something like that it was absolutely ridiculous um but you're G to have that and also I think that after after the last Bitcoin is mined or I guess the last fraction of the Bitcoin I guess the the last new Bitcoin that is put into circulation I think at that point transaction fees are going to be the price of Bitcoin is going to negate any sort of um uh fear I guess that the protocol will not be sustainable for miners because it's going to it it's going to be a really weird kind of equilibrium that the protocol and miners have to find because some miners are going to be like no it's over with like trans action fees are going to be all over the place who knows like it's not it's not you know set in stone like it has been with the the prog programmatic distribution schedule um but I think that the price of Bitcoin is going to be so high that like we're going to be fine on just transaction fees even if it is you know one Bitcoin per block or something like that I think that the the price is going to make it perfectly profitable for miners but it's going to be a really weak weird adjustment and I think we're going to see that with every having um but it it's it's something that you got to think about as a minor I think that was awesome and thank you for sharing all that one of the things like when people ask me my go-to is breaking down exactly what you said look there the the block reward is breaken broken down into transaction fees and then wherever we are and what Epoch and how much is given back to the miners and you know when that goes away so then we're going to be living on transaction fees and you went a little bit deeper there but I do think maybe that's the best word to use it's going to be a weird situation it's going to be a time that and like I said I think one of the weirdest things is that everyone listening to this now everyone in Bitcoin now everyone who's been around for a 50 block reward or a 25 block reward is not likely unless obviously advances in biotech and other things not likely going to be around for the 2140 when miners are sitting around like man I wonder what it was like to be able to do a transaction for I don't know a couple dollars because I do think that transaction fees are going to be exorbitant in when denominated in Fiat obviously by then there'll be a thousandth of a Bitcoin maybe U but obviously that in Fiat could be exorbitant compared to today's Bitcoin Fiat conversion so anyway um anything that you would want to tie into here that we touched upon when you came on the podcast that has to do with like mining Hardware Evolution I know looking out to 2140 is nearly possible when we think about Hardware Evolution because it was hard for us to E even talk about it on the podcast looking out 12 months with some of the developments but do you have any thoughts around what mining will look like by 2140 from a hardware standpoint and I know that that's an impossible question I just figure you're on mic so why not ask it I mean it's hard to think about what mining is going to look like next year um exactly but after after our podcast episode I had some people reach out and uh kind of talk about some of the things that I did touch on a few things and Shannon R CMO was one of them and he he was talking about how I mean Asic is the Asic mining scene is where we are and that's where we're going to be the the the challenge now is how efficient can we get as6 and make them you know the make them as good as they can be so we can you know get more hash rate per watt basically is is is the goal the goal is efficiency and how are we going to find that efficiency I don't know it's it's a waiting game on Asic chips at this point but um I I also did a little research and amongst some announcements and stuff that i' had seen uh fairly recently and also like over the past year or so I think that mining is going to go from espe at least in the um I guess interprise level mining is going to go from having you know a whole facility of jpr that are 30 lbs that you can pick up and hold in your in your hands to being something a lot more uh beefy I guess like you you're going to look at at a machine just a a visualization of kind of what I'm thinking about is like a much larger machine that you have to have like equipment to move that might have 25 hash boards in it or something like that and it's going to take up a lot more power it might be running on 480 and might consume you know several thousand more watts but at at the scale that you're going to be playing with on when we get to that point in my head this is all hypothesis that efficiency is going to beat out where we are right now with our you know I guess you could call them personal machines uh because and I I think that that's the only way that we can go forward is just make the machines bigger I guess I love that and I'd never i' never really done the thought experiment of like you know what's Bitcoin mining Hardware going to look like in 2140 but that's a very interesting world to think about because when you know the I I was watching a movie recently and like you know when the IBM computers came out they took up warehouses and now I have just as much compute power here in my iPhone if not more actually like a lot more so it's it's almost opposite basically it's exact exact opposite yep yeah because like CPUs I mean they're tiny and then gpus obviously and then so we've gone to asix which are much bigger and you know when you pick up an Asic for the first time you're like okay this is serious serious Hardware so then to think that yeah then maybe it's going to be something that's like 4 as6 that's put together which would kind of be like the size of like a standard duffel bag to then something that's the size of the desk I'm sitting at and then so on and so forth so anyways fascinating stuff I know you got to get back to work Tatum thank you so much for hopping on this check-in if you're listening to this on YouTube please subscribe podcast platforms Please Subscribe follow us at Compass mining on X LinkedIn and YouTube Tatum thanks so much man absolutely