In a little more than 10 years, Bitcoin has become a ubiquitous part of everyday life, and the community around Bitcoin (and other cryptocurrencies) has grow...
This is mostly accurate, but incorrect on a couple points:
The target time between "blocks," as new sections of the ledger are known, is 10 minutes, not half an hour.
The block reward is not 1 Bitcoin. It was originally 50 bitcoins, and is cut in half every 210,000 blocks. Eventually the block reward will be zero and mining will earn only transaction fees, at which point the maximum of 21 million bitcoins will have been mined.
It's an arbitrary limit for the sake of having an arbitrary limit, just like there's an arbitrary limit to the amount of gold on earth. This is part of the libertarian ideology baked into Bitcoin.
As for the latter question, the theory goes that transaction fees (which are paid to miners) will be sufficient to support mining as the block reward diminishes. In reality it's more likely that hashing power on the network will decrease as miners go bust, but that won't impact the overall system very much, really (the network adjusts to adapt to changing hashing power to ensure a 10 minute block time). It makes a specific type of attack on the overall system (51% attack, it's called) easier, but the value to an attacker of committing such an attack is, in my view, not well established (beyond having a short position in Bitcoin I suppose, but if you're going to break the law, a simple pump and dump is a much easier scheme to make money in crypto).
This is mostly accurate, but incorrect on a couple points:
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It's an arbitrary limit for the sake of having an arbitrary limit, just like there's an arbitrary limit to the amount of gold on earth. This is part of the libertarian ideology baked into Bitcoin.
As for the latter question, the theory goes that transaction fees (which are paid to miners) will be sufficient to support mining as the block reward diminishes. In reality it's more likely that hashing power on the network will decrease as miners go bust, but that won't impact the overall system very much, really (the network adjusts to adapt to changing hashing power to ensure a 10 minute block time). It makes a specific type of attack on the overall system (51% attack, it's called) easier, but the value to an attacker of committing such an attack is, in my view, not well established (beyond having a short position in Bitcoin I suppose, but if you're going to break the law, a simple pump and dump is a much easier scheme to make money in crypto).
:scared: