What Happens to Bitcoin When the Block Rewards Run Out?

Quick Read

• Bitcoin transaction fees have hit a 10-year low at 0.69% of miner revenue, averaging just $1,000 per block against a $200,000 block reward.

• Network computing power has dropped 33% since October 2025, with mining costs at $78,254 per coin now exceeding Bitcoin’s current $63,900 price.

• The April 2028 halving cuts block rewards to 1.5625 BTC, intensifying a fee-revenue gap that bigger blocks, Lightning, and tail emission each fail to solve.

Bitcoin (CRYPTO:BTC) pays miners in two ways, and one of them is running out. Miners collect 3.125 BTC for every block they add to the chain, and that reward halves every four years until it disappears around 2140, leaving them with nothing but the fees people pay to use the network.

However, those fees are going backwards. They now make up 0.69% of what miners earn, the lowest share in ten years, and they have stayed under 1% since the last halving in April 2024. That raises the obvious question of what happens to Bitcoin once the block rewards run out entirely.

When Bitcoin’s Block Rewards Actually Run Out

Roughly 95.5% of all the Bitcoin that will ever exist has already been mined, and the remaining 950,000 coins will take another 114 years to arrive. Those coins are worth around $60 billion at today’s Bitcoin price, but they trickle out so slowly that Bitcoin is already about as scarce as it will ever get.

Miners collect 3.125 bitcoin for every block, worth about $200,000 at current prices, and that figure halves roughly every four years. The next cut arrives around April 2028 and takes it to 1.5625 coins. Each halving after that cuts it in half again, until the reward reaches a single satoshi and rounds down to nothing around 2140.

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However, miners would keep validating blocks and securing the network exactly as they do now. Every dollar of their income would simply have to come from people paying for space in those blocks instead.

Satoshi Nakamoto expected fees to take over as the reward shrank. Four halvings have happened since 2012 and the reward has already dropped 94% from the original 50 coins, so most of that switch is behind us rather than ahead.

Bitcoin’s Fee Market Is at a 10-Year Low

Transaction fees now make up 0.69% of what Bitcoin miners earn, a 10-year low according to Glassnode, after dropping as far as 0.52% in April. Fees have stayed under 1% since the April 2024 halving, so the income that eventually has to cover everything is shrinking as a share of miner pay rather than growing.

Glassnode co-founder Rafael Schultze-Kraft noted on X that “Bitcoin was below $400 the last time fee share was this low.” The trend has picked up speed since April, which Capriole Investments called the least discussed concerning development in Bitcoin this year.

However, Bitcoin cannot fix this by handling more transactions. Blocks are a fixed size and arrive every ten minutes, which caps the network at roughly five transactions per second no matter how many people want in. So for fees alone to replace today’s block reward, every single transaction would need to pay about 0.00104 bitcoin, or roughly $66 at a Bitcoin price near $63,900.

Fees are nowhere near that. The average block collects 0.016 to 0.018 bitcoin in total, which is around $1,000 against a block reward worth $200,000.

What Happens to Bitcoin’s Security Without the Subsidy

Miners spend money on machines and electricity to compete for blocks, and that spending is what protects the Bitcoin price from anyone rewriting the ledger. Whoever controls most of the mining power can reverse their own payments and spend the same coins twice, so an attacker would have to outspend every miner at once. That costs about $5.2 billion, according to Charles Schwab, counting hardware, energy and the competition they would have to beat.

Dominating mining for a whole week costs roughly $6 billion at October 2025 prices, according to Duke University research, which breaks down as $4.6 billion for hardware, $1.34 billion for data centre construction and about $130 million a week in electricity—and that is 0.47% of Bitcoin’s market value today. Wrecking the network would normally destroy the attacker’s own payoff, except they could short Bitcoin heavily first and collect on the crash they caused.

However, miner income is already falling for reasons that have nothing to do with fees. Computing power on the network has dropped about 33% since October 2025, and it now costs around $78,254 to mine a single bitcoin against a Bitcoin price near $63,900, so plenty of operators are running at a loss. CoinShares expects AI work to supply 70% or more of revenue for some miners by the end of the year.

Even so, the network has already survived a version of this. Winter Storm Fern forced US miners to shut down rigs in January and knocked 30% to 40% of computing power offline over a single weekend. Blocks slowed from ten minutes to around twelve, then everything recovered once the power came back.

An attack is still the less likely problem. The US, China and Russia already host around 68% of all Bitcoin mining, so every miner that switches off leaves the network resting on fewer hands.

Is Bitcoin’s Fee Problem a 2140 Issue or a Today Issue?

Bitcoin has a problem today rather than in 2140, because the fee share reveals how the whole handover is going and it has been falling for a year while the Bitcoin price fell with it. This is expected to play out slowly, and the network has already handled worse, absorbing a 40% loss of computing power in a single weekend without missing a block.

Bigger or faster blocks would be the obvious fix, letting more transactions each pay less and still add up to something. However, larger blocks are harder to store and validate, so small operators drop out and the network ends up in even fewer hands. Moving activity onto Lightning is the other route, and it would settle more value on-chain. But most Lightning payments happen off-chain though, where miners collect nothing at all.

That leaves tail emission, which is a permanent 0.5% yearly issuance that would roughly cancel out coins lost forever. Peter Todd argued in 2022 that this stabilises the supply rather than inflating it, but it needs a hard fork and breaks the 21 million cap.

So the next test comes in April 2028, when the reward halves to 1.5625 coins while fees are still under 1% of miner pay. Miners would be collecting about $100,000 a block at today’s prices, with fees adding roughly $1,000 on top.

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