Reader Questions Part 1

After 359 days, the questions get harder. Here are two of the most important technical ones — answered properly.

What happens to Bitcoin’s security after the last halving when block rewards reach zero?

This is one of Bitcoin’s most genuinely open long-term questions. Currently, miners are compensated primarily by block rewards. As halvings continue, those rewards shrink toward zero — with the final Bitcoin mined around 2140. After that, transaction fees become the only miner compensation.

Whether fees alone will sustain sufficient mining activity to secure the network is uncertain. The optimistic case: as adoption grows, transaction volume grows, and fee revenue per block grows with it. The pessimistic case: predicting transaction demand 116 years out is speculation. What’s clear is that the community is actively working on this — second-layer solutions, the Ordinals-driven fee market expansion in 2024, and continued research into fee market design.

Could a quantum computer break Bitcoin’s cryptography?

Theoretically yes. A sufficiently powerful quantum computer could, in principle, derive private keys from public keys — breaking the elliptic curve cryptography that secures Bitcoin wallets. This is a real long-term concern.

The practical timeline is less certain. Current quantum computers are nowhere near the scale required. The Bitcoin development community has been aware of this for years and quantum-resistant cryptographic schemes exist and are being developed for potential integration. Bitcoin’s greatest vulnerability isn’t the cryptography in current wallets — it’s coins in old-style addresses where the public key is exposed on-chain.

The threat is real, not imminent, and known. That combination tends to produce solutions before crises in Bitcoin’s history.

Tomorrow: reader questions Part 2 — the honest uncertainty questions.

— The Daily Bit