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Without miners wouldn't the problem just be no more new bitcoins, so while the total would never grow we could still trade them?


No not at all. Miners are the ones generating blocks and validating them though the giant distributed work they each do. Without miners there would be no new blocks which means no verified transactions. The only place trades could still happen is on exchanges because they all happen off block and don't rely on the blockchain to track who owns what but it'd be impossible to move more coins onto or out of an exchange so you'd be stuck.


what happens when all possible bitcoins are mined then?


Miners will be paid with transaction fees. Already if you don't include a fee in your transaction you can expect much longer transaction confirmation times or to never receive confirmation because miners already try to pack the most fees into each single block to maximize their payout.


Miners' main function is to secure the blockchain, not to create new coins. The term is a bit of a misnomer. Without miners no transactions could be made, so Bitcoin would become worthless. More rudimentarly miners simply inject expense into the chain, making it too costly to hack. Another (imperfect) way of thinking about it, is that miners pre-hack the chain by doing all the brute force that a hacker otherwise would, making it unhackable.


No, you need miners to transfer bitcoins




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