But I mean, their bitcoins are not going away, their wallets are still there, their bitcoins also right? I thought bitcoin mining was proportionally hard to the number of already mined bitcoins, not the number of people mining?

I probably should look this up in wikipedia first.

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haakon 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It's a common misunderstanding that mining just gets harder and harder as time goes by and more coins are minted. It's often misreported that way. But in fact, the difficulty is dynamic and adjusts itself to keep minting at the predetermined rate regardless of the number of participants. Mining has gotten harder on long timelines, but only because more computing power has been added.

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xigoi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Doesn’t that contradict the Wikipedia article?

> Miners who successfully create a new block with a valid nonce can collect transaction fees from the included transactions and a fixed reward in bitcoins. To claim this reward, a special transaction called a coinbase is included in the block, with the miner as the payee. All bitcoins in existence have been created through this type of transaction. This reward is halved every 210,000 blocks until ₿21 million have been issued in total, which is expected to occur around the year 2140. Afterward, miners will only earn from transaction fees.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin (emphasis mine)

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bawolff 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Difficulty and block rewards are separate things. There is no contradiction here.

Block reward stays constant, amount of work required (on average) to get a block reward is dynamic in order to make it so that total number of rewards given out over a length of time stays roughly constant.

So if too many block rewards are claimed in a given time frame, difficulty is increased to slow things down. If not enough are claimed then difficulty decreases to make it easier to get one.

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raincole 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

The reward of each block will only get smaller. But the power needs to mine a block is dynamic.

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xigoi 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Sure, but that’s not what miners care about. The power needed to get a given amount of money doubles whenever the reward is halved.

	▲	raincole an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I honestly don't know which part of "the difficulty being dynamic" is this hard to understand. > The power needed to get a given amount of money doubles whenever the reward is halved. Yes, by that moment it does. And some miners still stop mining if mining became too unprofitable. And the difficulty will decrease because less miners are mining. And the power needed to get a given amount of bitcoin will decrease. (Not necessarily to the level before halving, ofc) Or your comment was about this part of the grandparent comment: > keep minting at the predetermined rate ? If so, I think you misunderstood what they were trying to say (or their wording was misleading). It's a predetermined rate. Not a constant rate. It's predetermined to be halved at (roughly) certain moments. Halving happens about every four years, and pouring more power into mining won't make it happen significantly sooner or later. That's what they were trying to say.