Somebody presumably has to be getting to customary 0.0001 satos trans fee...why not the folks processing the transactions.-Stoic Joker
The fee does go to the folks processing the transactions: The miners!-Deozaan
I'm not quite sure that's entirely the case, as there's a fixed number of BTC to mine. So (yes many years in the future), after all the coin has been mined there would be no point in continuing to mine ... So the currency would become worthless because no one would be processing the transactions. Unless there is something else going on in the way of verification ... Got a map of this one Renegade??
-Stoic Joker
As I understand it, the miner gets the new coin reward which, as you said, is very gradually moving to zero. But the miner also gets the fees from
all the transactions included in the block he creates when he successfully mines a new block. This provides incentive for miners to continue mining even when the new coin reward is zero. Right now, since the fee is so small, it's probably an almost negligible incentive for mining, especially when compared to the new coin reward. But someday (again, probably many years/decades in the future) there will be so many daily/hourly transactions happening that the miners will be making much more money from fees than from new coin rewards. The more ubiquitous bitcoin becomes, the more fees will be paid out to miners for their services of verifying all transactions for the rest of us.
Bitcoin absolutely depends on miners always mining, forever! If everybody stopped mining, Bitcoin would die because no new transactions would be verified. Miners are the people who create new blocks for the blockchain, which verifies all transactions inside said blocks.
I recommend reading the
original paper on Bitcoin by Satoshi Nakamoto.It will give a brief overview of the overall system and how it works. It's only 9 pages (one of which is cited sources/references) and relatively easy to understand in plain English. I was concerned that it would be above my head since I know little of cryptography and mathematics, but I followed it fairly easily, for the most part.
See especially the second paragraph (found on page 4 of the PDF) in the quote below:
By convention, the first transaction in a block is a special transaction that starts a new coin owned by the creator of the block [the miner]. This adds an incentive for nodes to support the network, and provides a way to initially distribute coins into circulation, since there is no central authority to issue them. The steady addition of a constant of amount of new coins is analogous to gold miners expending resources to add gold to circulation. In our case, it is CPU time and electricity that is expended.
The incentive can also be funded with transaction fees. If the output value of a transaction is less than its input value, the difference is a transaction fee that is added to the incentive value of the block containing the transaction. Once a predetermined number of coins have entered circulation, the incentive can transition entirely to transaction fees and be completely inflation free.
The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth.
Blockchain.info has some stats for the past 24 hours showing that (as of this edit) 4,025 BTC were mined and ~29.5 BTC in transaction fees were earned by miners. But that's only for ~160,000 transactions. Add a couple zeroes to the end of that number and you can see how it won't be hard for earnings from transaction fees to greatly outweigh new coins being generated, especially since the reward is scheduled to reduce by half next year.
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