Bitcoin After Block Rewards

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] Bitcoin After Block Rewards Junhyuk Lee Bitcoin's block reward is scheduled to decline to zero, raising concerns about whether the network can remain secure once miners rely solely on transaction fees. This paper seeks to identify the conditions under which large-scale and persistent deviation from honest mining can arise. We analyze and compare the payoffs of honest and deviating miners in a sequential decision model, and identify a deviation threshold G_t at which honest mining ceases to be privately optimal. Around the 2024 Bitcoin halving, we show that current mining behavior does not exhibit large-scale or structural deviation. However, when the block reward is removed, the G_t criterion implies that deviation can arise even with a very small fraction of transaction fees. Finally, we evaluate three protocol-level mechanisms: Base Fee, Fee Floor, and an adaptive maximum block size rule, and show that their combination raises the deviation threshold and mitigates incentive breakdown in a fee-only regime. These results provide a practical benchmark for assessing Bitcoin's security as block rewards disappear. Comments: 30 pages, 9 figures Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing (cs.DC); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT) Cite as: arXiv:2606.05503 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2606.05503v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.05503 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Junhyuk Lee [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 22:58:41 UTC (161 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs cs.DC cs.GT References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)