Bitcoin miners create transaction blocks. The difficulty adjusts to the amount of miners competing to make a block. Each block creates a certain number of new bitcoin, halving every 4 years.
Today you mine a new block and you get about $300,000 in value. This pays for a lot of mining equipment and electricity, but in 20 years all other things being equal you'd only get $10,000 per block (1/32). In other words, in the past there was a gold rush of electricity and hardware put into making new blocks because the coins from block itself was so valuable, but in the future the value comes from people paying you to make transactions.
Basically, if the value of a transaction (not value traded) is 1 cent ultimately it'll cost 1 cent worth of electricity to make that trade.
You could say we're already in the period where bitcoin mining is paid for by transactions. Bitcoin protocol can't fit enough transactions into blocks to handle the volume, so transaction cost skyrockets, so they've created a new means to batch up lots of transaction off books and use bitcoin to finalize them all in one block.
It's complicated.
Bitcoin miners create transaction blocks. The difficulty adjusts to the amount of miners competing to make a block. Each block creates a certain number of new bitcoin, halving every 4 years.
Today you mine a new block and you get about $300,000 in value. This pays for a lot of mining equipment and electricity, but in 20 years all other things being equal you'd only get $10,000 per block (1/32). In other words, in the past there was a gold rush of electricity and hardware put into making new blocks because the coins from block itself was so valuable, but in the future the value comes from people paying you to make transactions.
Basically, if the value of a transaction (not value traded) is 1 cent ultimately it'll cost 1 cent worth of electricity to make that trade.
You could say we're already in the period where bitcoin mining is paid for by transactions. Bitcoin protocol can't fit enough transactions into blocks to handle the volume, so transaction cost skyrockets, so they've created a new means to batch up lots of transaction off books and use bitcoin to finalize them all in one block.