choult said that, as he/she understands it, mining will stop because there won't be any new bitcoins rewarded with new blocks. That's not an incomplete understanding, it's wrong.
Granted, it's wrong because of an incomplete understanding of bitcoin mining, which is that there are two parts to the reward. However, an incorrect conclusion based on incomplete information is still an incorrect conclusion.
Your statement, today, is probably correct. The percentage payout per block is probably worth a lot less than the value of the 25 bitcoins currently being rewarded. As others have stated, that'll probably change as the reward drops.
Besides only including transactions that pay a higher percentage in a block, I imagine that the higher hashrates will allow more transactions to be included in each block, so there are two ways miners can increase their return. Miners aren't just competing on speed to get the next block; they also have to get the largest block that includes the most transactions. When a transaction gets included in more than one block, the larger block 'wins'.
I suspect we're going to see a parallel to the transition from faster CPUs to multi-core CPUs that occurred when CPUs stopped getting faster. Until this year, we were seeing faster and faster software and hardware used to calculate hashes for bitcoin mining, but ASICs are almost certainly the end of that advancement. So now, I think, we're going to see miners expanding their capability horizontally by hashing in parallel... Maybe by splitting twice as many transactions as typically used today into two different blocks and trying to hash both at the same time.
Granted, it's wrong because of an incomplete understanding of bitcoin mining, which is that there are two parts to the reward. However, an incorrect conclusion based on incomplete information is still an incorrect conclusion.
Your statement, today, is probably correct. The percentage payout per block is probably worth a lot less than the value of the 25 bitcoins currently being rewarded. As others have stated, that'll probably change as the reward drops.
Besides only including transactions that pay a higher percentage in a block, I imagine that the higher hashrates will allow more transactions to be included in each block, so there are two ways miners can increase their return. Miners aren't just competing on speed to get the next block; they also have to get the largest block that includes the most transactions. When a transaction gets included in more than one block, the larger block 'wins'.
I suspect we're going to see a parallel to the transition from faster CPUs to multi-core CPUs that occurred when CPUs stopped getting faster. Until this year, we were seeing faster and faster software and hardware used to calculate hashes for bitcoin mining, but ASICs are almost certainly the end of that advancement. So now, I think, we're going to see miners expanding their capability horizontally by hashing in parallel... Maybe by splitting twice as many transactions as typically used today into two different blocks and trying to hash both at the same time.