Hearn: The resolution of the Bitcoin experiment

My limited understanding was that miners will always matter even if all the coins have been mined. Instead miners will be needed to "sign" the next block chain and are to be paid the transaction fees in that block. Thus there is always a market for a lot of miners over time as that is how the costs of who wins the "fees" gets solved.

However that may be flawed as it was from a talk a couple of years ago.