Bitcoin Forum

Bitcoin is NOT mathematically limited to twenty one million bitcoins.

I do not support raising the cap at this time but if we had overwhelming support like we did for Segwit we could raise the limit to any number we could dream up.  

I would have no issue changing the code to allow a 1 bitcoin reward for every block forever... to ensure a strong distributed mining community.  

I understand this must sound like blasphemy to the majority of the community but it irks me to see such a false statement about bitcoin repeated over and over again in every Bitcoin youtube video out there; there has to be a better way to phase it.

well, good news for you is that this limit that you are talking about is NOT 21 million bitcoin. it is 2,100,000,000,000,000 units based on what code says and that unit is called satoshi and is more than enough to sustain any kind of "overwhelming support"


take a look at Dogecoin and see what this kind of distribution did to it.

oh of coarse yes that changes everything thank you so much for showing me the light. 

would there be a need to raise the limit from 21,000,000?

currently 0.0000020 is equal to approximately $0.01c
bitcoin would have to quadruple [i think] in value before a raise in cap?

its a pity that 0.00000001 is not called 1BTC

Year     #bitcoins       Inflation per annum
2009     1,624,250          -
--------------------------------------------------
2010     5,020,250        209.1%
2011     8,001,400         59.4%
2012    10,733,825         34.1%
2013    12,199,725         13.7%
2014    13,671,200         12.1%
--------------------------------------------------
2015    15,029,525          9.9%
2016    16,075,400          7.0%
2017    16,750,400          4.2%  (estimate)  
2018    17,425,400          4.0%  (estimate)  
2019    18,100,400          3.9%  (estimate)  
--------------------------------------------------
2020    18,575,200          2.6%  (estimate, halvening)
2021    18,912,700          1.8%  (estimate)
2022    19,250,200          1.8%  (estimate)
2023    19,587,700          1.8%  (estimate)
2024    19,806,350          1.1%  (estimate, halvening)
--------------------------------------------------
2025    19,975,100          0.9%  (estimate)
2026    20,143,850          0.8%  (estimate)
2026    20,312,600          0.8%  (estimate)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I do not think the community would object to an inflation rate of less then 0.5% per year to insure a strong distributed mining community (in the event the mining community was not sufficiently subsidized by transaction fees) 

dont be a fool.

first of all.. at code level there are no "21million coins"

its all based in satoshis as the units of measure

EG
125000000sats per block reward right now, which mathematically gets to be ~21 quadrillion units of measure once 'rewards' have gone through all thir halvings.

[certain cartel] have already been salivating at the idea of changing
125000000units of measure per block(at code level).. to become
125000000000units of measure per block reward.. to be stupidly compatible with the [certain cartel]:LN code - (research millisats)

so think long and hard about the effect it has
..( v their lame excuse v )
 the way the code has been written in satoshis.. there will be a issue in 8 halvings time not 29 more as some thought.
.) 1250000000
1.) 625000000
2.) 312500000
3.) 156250000
4.) 78125000
5.) 39062500
6.) 19531250
7.) 9765625
8.) 4882812.5
..

so something has to change to avoid rounding errors.. and then again in 12 halvings from now(if they went with the 1000 multiplication of units of measure) another alteration would be needed

12.) 305175.78125

some people think its good to add on more units of measure. but that just extends the 'reward' mining for a few years

changing the units of measure is something to think about when needed to change things in 32 years time+.. but doing it now and then keep doing it is just ruining some aspects of bitcoin that made it better than fiat.. just ends up being done just to let people be greedy rather than as a fix for an issue thats not an issue right now

..
in short
although the GUI will incorrectly pretend there are only 21mill bitcoins. the number of shareable units will carry on increasing


please note my post contents of the maths is correct but i had to remove some of the comments about a certain cartel to avoid censorship deletions of my posts, so i apologise that the context does not flow

why do i fee a strong sarcasm in this :P

A change may be required in many years, however with BTC being easily and totally usually down to 8 decimal places, I don't see this need arising for a while. It's simply the human mentality of liking whole numbers and numbers >1. An easy solution is to adopt the mBTC as some did back when BTC first touched $1,000

I don't see how such "overwhelming support" would ever materialise.  Anyone with eyes can see what effect unbridled money printing has done to the fiat economy, so I don't see why anyone would be willing to jeopardise introducing such a practice here when what we have works so well.  Perhaps "mathematically limited" is an incorrect way to phrase it, I can't really argue with that one.  But the 21 million cap is absolutely considered a fundamental principle (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes#Fundamental_Principles).  

A fundamental principle! Thats Brilliant yes thank you thats what I was looking for. And yeah I agree with you I'm just playing devils advocate here so chill out guys.
Another solution to a collapsing mining community would be to periodically change the proof of work.
But when someone asks you about the 21 million cap tell them its a "fundamental principle" and not a mathematically limited law or some shit because thats just a fairy tail.

At first I thought sarcasm was in that line as well, but sometimes it takes another set of eyes to see the satoshis in front of you.  :)
Someday we will be buying iPhones with a few hundred or a few thousand Satoshis... that's the part that will make us seem very old to the youngsters.   I can almost hear my future self saying "way back in 2017 they gave away Satoshis at hundreds of sites!  10 bucks was a million of those, at one point." 👵🏻<-- that's future me.

I see your point, op.

Let's hope SegWit is the worst mistake we make. A mistake as you describe would mean we actually failed in this Bitcoin experiment. Hopefully less than 50% of the miners will also ever think so.

The whole point of Bitcoin is that it has a limited supply. Some bad actors want to increase the total supply in the process (Bitcoin Unlimited would need that) but some people like Tone Vays which are known for their anti hardfork policy, have questioned if Bitcoin is viable forever with 0% inflation.

Im yet to see clear evidence of BTC not being viable with a limited supply forever. The fees derived from the transactions should be enough to incentivize miners to process the transactions, or at least that was Satoshi's original plan.

Bitcoin doesn't actually divide by two.  That's an easy way to describe it for non-programmers, but...

Bitcoins stores the block subsidy as an integer number of satoshis.  At each adjustment time (210000 blocks) it performs a "bitwise right shift" on that integer.  This has the effect of dropping the least significant bit and then moving all the other bits over one place in that direction.

So 1250000000 satoshis (12.5 BTC) in binary is:

If we chop off the right most digit (notice only 6 zeros to the right of the last one instead of seven) we get:

Which as an integer has a base₁₀ value of 625000000 satoshis (6.25 BTC).

Now, if you hack off the last digit when it is a one, it has an effect identical to dividing by 2 AND ROUNDING DOWN TO THE NEAREST INTEGER.

9765625 satoshis (0.09765625 BTC) in binary is:

When the code performs the bitwise right shift, the result is:
Which when represented as a base₁₀ integer is is 4882812 satoshis (or 0.04882812 BTC).

Notice there is no additional unit or measure needed, and that extra 5 digit you mentioned doesn't actually exist.

As such, the total amount of bitcoins that will be created will actually be less than 20999999.9769 (less than 2099999997690000 satoshis).

if enough people want it then so be it.

i can imagine the only people who'll want it will be miners so it'll be them versus everyone else apart from the usual power grab crew.

by the time it does become an issue hopefully we'll have found a way to dispose of small cabals of miners holding everyone else to ransom.

Just a short question, WHY?

Why would anyone consider this, want this or support this? It s like asking if it would be possible for BTC to be official currency of Mars.

I don't believe that a 1 bitcoin per block subsidy forever is necessary to "ensure a strong distributed mining community". I guess you assume that blocks will remain small and transaction fees will remain close to 0 forever. I don't believe either of those.

In what ways to you believe that the strength and distribution of mining depend on the amount of the block reward? In my view, the security of the network depends on the amount of the block reward. High block reward means high security, and vice versa. But I don't know how it could affect the distribution of mining.

Finally, how did you arrive at 1 BTC? Maybe 10 BTC is needed to "ensure a strong distributed mining community". Maybe 0.

That's already been asked multiple times on this forum.  Here's an example from 2014:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=724884.0

This... might be one of the best responses I have ever seen! Thank you for the great laugh on a Friday afternoon here. We have just been swapping dank memes here in the office.

I'm kinda confused over here, isn't raising the caps on the number of satoshi in the bitcoins system devalue the currency, I believe that's what happens in the world of economics, print more money and you will devalue the currency. Look at Zimbabwe for example.

By then transaction fees will be enough. Either due to larger blocks or due to cumulative fees for settling 2nd layer solutions. In both cases due to the fact that the market will always strive towards an equilibrium of Bitcoin price and mining cost.



That would definitely endanger network security and stability. Also there would be an unwanted incentive for miners to influence the decision which proof of work to use in their favour.

In a way what you say makes sense but I do not think that is going to be supported by anyone that is invested heavily in bitcoin, that will only lower the value of their own bitcoin so in a way you are taking value from them and giving it to someone else and also if that happened then bitcoin will not be that different from fiat.

Again I'm not asking for support to raise the cap, I'm just pointing out it could be raised and that we should stop referring to it as some aspect of Bitcoin that is mathematically limited by fundamental laws of the Universe because its not, its consensus limited.

Its a "fundamental principle" of the Bitcoin community yes, its  strongly held as one of our core tenets. But it could still be changed. So stop saying its limited without pointing out what its limited by.
Other things about Bitcoin irk me too, like the wallet should be called a key chain. Bitcoin is inflationary not deflationary. Or how 60% of all bitcoins have never been spent and are likely lost forever But no one takes this into consideration when calculating the market cap of Bitcoin.


It just irks me and I'm pointing it out.

I think a 21 million market cap is not the limit of bitcoins there is a lot of blocks to be found in mining bitcoin therefore may add up to the current market cap that is $45,702,542,735 billion. Obviously it has already surpassed the 21 million market cap so bitcoin will continue as long as more an more people decides to use it or to hold it and the price will add up also. The only limit is when we've mined all the bitcoin blocks then two problems will be faced one is the supply will be limited and whoever holds the most of it will be the riches. Can't we find any solution to continue mining bitcoins?

If you take 1 Satoshi as a base value then your problem is solved. You are thinking 1 Bitcoin as the base value but in few years we will be working and selling our stuff for satoshis. Its already happening actually, there are some services in the forum which pays you 10k-100k Satoshi for a job.

its not printing more money.
its cutting a bank note into confetti to then make each scrap of paper sharable. in the hope that each scrap of paper pushes the value up

EG
imagine a $10 bank note buys 10 loaves of bread.

cut the $10 bank note up so 1000 people can have a 'bank note' instead of one person. and hope that each scrap of paper buys 1 loaf of bread. making if you selotape the scraps together... a whole bank note be valued at 1000 loaves of bread.

(which converting to old fiat value becomes $1000 value of whole bank note)

its the opposite of zimbabwe's inflation where one day 1 bank note of X ZD buys a loaf.. then later it requires printing millions of ZD to buy a single loaf.

ZD=inflation
dividing units of measure = deflation

but thats just visually. because the confetti analogy is a new twisted method of creating new 'smaller' bank notes.. so it gets confusing to people depending on which way you look at it

Where has it been claimed that Bitcoin is mathematically limited by fundamental laws of the universe? I can only think of the infamous "Bitcoin - Your money is secured by the laws of the universe." image with the sun in the background, but that's referring to Bitcoin's cryptographic key space, not the 21 million limit.

Well I would like to also point out that if the 21 million cap limit was increased then what we have is no longer Bitcoin.

Even if 99.97% of the users still call it "Bitcoin" it won't be Bitcoin to me. It would be a PoS coin. Not proof-of-stake, but piece-of-shit.

Same for me. The rules were set in stone, anything that raises the total amount of coins is a scam and not Bitcoin. Show me proof of Bitcoin having problems to survive long term without inflation because there's no sound proof to be found out there. The inflation will be so small by 2040 that you can consider all coins mined already, most of the revenue will be fees. Hell in just 10 years the curve starts becoming incredibly steep which is another reason why I think by 2027 the price will be 6 figures to a million dollars (assuming big block retards don't ruin it with wanting to hardfork everyday):

https://cointelegraph.com/storage/uploads/view/1d067f3721f10f0a76439de9860a4e54.png

Notice how there is a big change in angle in 10 years. In 2040 you can consider bitcoin 99% mined.

I feel like you are splitting hairs. It can be shown using math that under the current rules the number of bitcoins is limited to less than 21 million.

On the other hand, it annoys me when somebody claims that something has been proven "mathematically", where "mathematically" is intended to mean that the evidence is very strong.

The day someone raises the 21 mio limit, is the day that bitcoin will crash in price. SO many will get out at that point because it's the whole idea behind btc.

With the same reasoning that someone can fork to implement any changes (and some percentage of community might accept it as Bitcoin) you could argue that Bitcoin is not decentralized, not trustless, not immutable, not irreversible, et cetera, et cetera. This doesn't really proves or means anything, because consensus structures can't be inherently unchangeable. One could argue that all Constitutions are useless, because majority could vote and change them however they like.

The game theory involving the total supply of bitcoin is a self supporting one where the people with the most skin in the game are the strongest against it, because the more money you get on BTC, the less you like the idea of your savings depreciating by the total supply being increased, this is why I can sleep tight, because I know that the people with the most say in the game (the big holders) are all against that idea.

Also most people get attracted to owning BTC because of the limited supply.

I really can't picture a realistic scenario where the change would happen. While possible, in practice we can say it's set in stone.

Well, it is currently mechanically limited to 21M, and I think that's all anyone talks about when they say that Bitcoin is limited. I have heard a ton of discussions about having a fork to change the maximum amount of Bitcoin, and they've been met with the typical comments of "that can't work", "it would ruin the trust in the blockchain", etc. And it makes sense, really. Halving forever would hypothetically be great for the value of Bitcoin, on paper, since the value would double every 4 years (in a perfect world, that is) and we would be able to reap the benefits of the mechanics of the blockchain rewards. Having one BTC/block forever would interrupt that balance, to an extent.

Although I support some of Quantus' arguments, Segwit is actually a bad example - because it's a soft fork and there will be no chain claiming it's the "original" one.

A change to a more flexible supply model would always mean that a hard fork is involved - and that would mean that in the moment when the fork occurs, a chain would persist that continues with the 21 million limit. The people supporting this chain will always claim that they are running the original Bitcoin.

But actually the question "who's the original" is a social convention - because with every hard fork the same can occur. So in this aspect, Quantus is right.

Let's take the planned 2MB hard fork in November: I think if there is no agreement between Core and the Segwit2x folks, a minority chain will try to survive with the 1MB cap enabled and will claim that they are the original chain.

But the difference between the 1MB cap change and the 21 million bitcoins cap change is that the 21 million cap was "set in stone" at the beginning of Bitcoin's evolution, like cellard correctly points out, and is considered a fundamental principle. The 1MB cap, in contrast, has even described by Satoshi as a temporary measure (something Big blockers point out every day).

So the support for "21 million forever" is expected to be nearly unanimous (I think >95%) while the 1MB support may be a small majority or not even that. That's why a 2MB hard fork has much more chances to succeed in becoming "the Bitcoin" than a "+21 million" fork.

There will always be people who will only support a bitcoin with 21 million coins. Even if there's weekly forks of bitcoin with more supplies, those forks/chains can be ignored and us 21bitcoin supporters will always support the true 21 million coin blockchain. Even if it has 8MB or 40MB blocksizes and other upgrades, as long as the supply is not increased.

Satoshi set the 1MB cap as a temporary measure, but he predicted that users would get "tyrannical" against raising it because of not being able to run nodes and so on.

Also, Satoshi did NOT have the current understandings of what different blocksizes would mean, he did not predict mining pools, he did not predict a lot of things.

ALL the experts point to a hardfork in 3 months being stupid, we should evaluate segwit for a longer time then take a more informed decision.

I've seen no such statement of Satoshi's.  Please provide a link.


You have some way of knowing what Satoshi's understandings were?  Are you Satoshi?


While he may not have publicly predicted mining pools prior to their existence, is clear that Satoshi was aware of the existence of mining pools as soon as they were created:

I would object.

Why do we need a strong mining community after nearly all the coins have been mine? Preserving spending power is a critical difference between Bitcoin and traditional currencies. If Bitcoin ceases to be more valuable tomorrow than it is today there will be less incentive for people to adopt it as a currency!

Basically, what we just need to do is reflect more accurately that Bitcoin is not immune to inflation due to a hard cap, since divisions of units is always going to be possible, if there is consensus. No matter, we've learnt to stop thinking Bitcoin is anonymous, we can adapt to this concept too.

Strictly speaking, I prefer arguments that the number of created bitcoins is limited to 21 million. This means that bitcoin will eventually grow in the course, since under equal conditions of its circulation its quantity will constantly decrease due to the loss of access to it due to various objective reasons. If it continues to be produced in large quantities and further, then the effect is somewhat reminiscent of inflation.

  While you are right, yet another reason (perhaps the strongest) we will need to create more coins is that they will always get lost. There are thousands of coins lost already - which will never be found.
  Given that coins will continue getting lost as long as we use Bitcoin, the price will go up ans demand increases and supply diminishes naturally. While this is good for Bitcoin owners/HODLers, the simply reality is we are going to need more coins at some point (whether it be 100 or 200 years in the future).
  Just imagine when large transactions inevitably get lost in the future. Twenty one million coins seems like a lot, but on a global scale it is nothing.

It's not really a false statement when it is in fact true at the moment. Yes we there could be a proposed changed by the users but I think most people don't see a real purpose in doing so, because once again Bitcoin is divisible all the way down to .00000001. So increasing the maximum distribution of the coin really doesn't serve any purpose and in fact will devalue Bitcoin to current holders.

Of course we can't know exactly what satoshi had in mind, but that is irrelevant. What we know today is: We don't need to risk a hardfork in 3 months, there's enough space with 1MB (and now with segwit) to roll with it for at least a safe year while additional research is made on that possible hardfork to 2MB. Doing it in 3 months is just stupid. Why would you risk the current uptrend with another massive crash again due hardfork drama when we don't need to? Let's do things right for once.

Nice, but that statement was not a prediction. It was a hypothetical scenario used to show how one block chain is not necessarily suitable for all applications.

Satoshi was a visionary for his time but it isn't like he was infallible so take anything he says with a grain of salt and perhaps don't try to read too much into what he meant by it.

I think the Segwitx2 agreement is the best temporary solution to scaling and incorporates elements from both sides of the argument as to how to proceed forward.

I would argue that Satoshi was offering a hypothetical example of why it might make sense for different use cases to each have their own blockchain (DNS, currency, etc) rather than try to have a single blockchain that can be used for every possible purpose. He wasn't saying that
Bitcoin users ACTUALLY might get "tyrannical" against raising the block size, but instead that BitDNS users shouldn't be dependent on what Bitcoin users want since they're each likely have different needs. Or did you think Satoshi was also predicting that BitDNS users were going to actually "be completely liberal about adding any large data features"

One thing that is not emphasized strongly enough on this topic is that it is very difficult to envision a scenario in which there would be a positive reason to increase the coin supply beyond the current plan. Adding more coins dilutes the value of existing coins, so the current community of bitcoin users will naturally oppose such a change. Miners might like the idea of earning more coins with an enlarged block reward, but the course of events with the recent UASF and resulting SW2X outcome vs. Bitmain's efforts proves that miners who oppose the market will be forced to back down. At worst miners would create a "21M+" fork, and users would support the legacy fork, forcing hashrate to shift back to the economically valued chain and defeating the attempt to change the coin supply.

I totally agree here. My post was not about advocating for a 2MB hardfork in November. I also would like a longer evaluation period before any hardfork.

But there is - in the Bitcoin community - a difference between the 21 million rule and the blocksize. In the "blocksize war" there are notable different opinions, with a relatively large group of Bitcoiners agreeing to each position: The "extreme big blockers" that don't want any limit and would even be OK with gigabyte-large blocks, "moderate big blockers" (2-8MB) and "small blockers" (at most, 1 MB with segwit). In contrast, the 21 million supply cap is nearly unanimously agreed on - so it's much more difficult to change it with a hard fork. That's what the post was about.


A reason that could reach a bit of support would be the deflationary nature of Bitcoin, once we reach a supply between 20 and 21 million and the block rewards are worth less than the coins lost in addresses whose private keys aren't known anymore. There are disagreeing views about deflation, according to the economic schools, but there could be a group with some support on that reasoning. Only that I don't think it will ever reach consensus (what would be necessary to raise the cap in an undisputed hard fork).

It's pretty much guaranteed that a change in the total supply would diverge into 2 different coins, but what worries me is if it's viable or not, to not have any inflation.

I need to see some reputable coders to speak on this. I have not seen any Core devs arguing about this so that is a good indicator there's nothing wrong with it (Unless you buy into the Core dev conspiracy theories).

I've heard some critique about it, claiming that if there is no inflation, when the reward is negligible (so that's in like 10 years) we will see problems, so we'll find out, we don't need to wait 140 years for the last BTC to be mined.

It's difficult to predict when the reward will be negligible.

In 10 years the subsidy will be 3.125 BTC per block.
At the current exchange rate, if the miner collects no transaction fees at all, that's nearly $8600 per block.  Is that "negligible"?

In 11 years the subsidy will drop to 1.5625 BTC per block.
At the current exchange rate, if the miner collects no transaction fees at all, that's nearly $4300 per block.  Is that "negligible"?

Of course, there is a real possibility that the exchange rate could go up over the next decade or so.

In 15 years the subsidy will drop below 1 BTC to 0.78125 BTC per block.
If the exchange rate is $300,000 per bitcoin, then even if the miner collects no transaction fees at all, that's still $234,375 per block.  Is that ""negligible"?

Well, from what i've heard, looking at the algorithm curve, it "looks" negligible in paper. The line becomes too steep, almost straight.

You mention $300,000 per coin. Well then yes, that would be awesome for us holders, and we wouldn't probably have a problem, but we need to get there. The thing is, nobody knows, what we know for a fact is what we have now: how the curve looks like. The price is an unknown variable. Satoshi predicted that BTC will either be a lot or nothing, so I guess if everything goes ok, we should be at 6 figures per BTC in the next decade, when the line becomes almost straight, otherwise we may face serious problems. Let's just hope it's a self fulfilling prophecy and we hit these dreamy 6 figure per coin prices. Back in 2012 $1000 felt dreamy, who is to say we can't hit $100,000+.

twenty one million bitcoins ! It may be too much, but in the future, this number will come to us less, because I see those seeking bitcoin on hard disks, will be lost and dead.

Currently bitcoin is limited to a total number by the rules of math and code. Yes, if you could get everyone to agree to change the code then the limit could be increased. Hell, if you could get everyone to agree we could change the code so that every block required a cat gif be attached. Literally any part of bitcoin could be changed with enough support, but we assume these things as reasonably core tenets since it seems unlikely for them to change. So the bigger question is why would we ever want to raise the cap?

The day we change the 21 million limit is the day bitcoin becomes valueless. I would divest at least 90% of my coins and move into gold.
Not that this is going to happen.

Here we need to understand one thing, in next 10 to 20 years, the tx fees to be collected from the transactions included in one block might be summing up more than 50 bitcoins also (the original block reward).

Hence there will be no point of thinking about one bitcoin reward for every block for ever. I do not understand how it will ensure a strong distributed mining community when they are already having enough reasons to be part of bitcoin community.

There seem to be quite a few people in the thread repeating the same general theme:


But RoftheN hits the nail on the head with this:


This couldn't be more right.  People trying to change the cap wouldn't be some foregone conclusion.  The only way you can change the supply is a hardfork and a hardfork means there will always be a 21 million supply chain we could continue using.  One would naturally assume that the chain with the raised supply and the money printing would be a minority fork.  But even if it wasn't and we ended up in the perverse (and highly unlikely) situation that the 21 million supply chain was in the minority, there's still sheer bloody-minded belligerence to consider.  And there are probably always going to be enough of us with such a mindset for that to count for something.  I'd like to think we would continue to breathe life into our preferred chain, even if the odds were stacked against us.

For example, mining is generally the last thing I'd see myself doing in Bitcoin, but if there were ever a situation where the rest of the world went insane and decided to support a chain with a larger supply, even I'd seriously consider ordering some shiny new hardware and pointing it at a pool supporting the real thing.  Whatever happens, it's never going to be unanimous, so it's merely a question of how far you're willing to go to defend your ideals.  Those of you who would dump are free to do that, but my first instinct would be to fight it and trust the market to see sense in due time.  Plus, if they ever did go down the route of money printing, sooner or later, that chain will inevitably crash and burn, no matter how much support it might have.  So I'm certain that, in some form or another, there will always be a 21 million cap.

As we've already established, it's not a mathematical limit, but a principled one.  And in some ways, principles can prove stronger.

On a related note bitcoin is NOT limited to being called bitcoin. Just a few tiny tweaks and it could be called bitloin.  :o

Woah. Think about that!  :D

Exactly. So far the growth of Bitcoin relative to fiat has always offset the loss of declining block rewards - and then some. Assuming that Bitcoin is still alive and kicking in 15 years this trend is likely to continue. Worst case the Bitcoin fiat price can't keep up with the block reward halving, in which case less electricity will be spent on mining. But as long as Bitcoin exists, mining will always find a profitable optimum of more or less hashpower. That's the beauty of it.



Duuude. So what you're saying is that Bitcoin is NOT grammatically limited to the name Bitcoin? :O

Mind blown.

 :o

You mean there will be that many transactions to be included when considering fees will be one satoshi or even lesser than that also will be possible then ?

Anyways, in next 20 years we can expect massive number of transactions for every block and hence we can expect miners to earn better. If these are the cases then there will be no meaning to think about having unlimited bitcoins just for the reason making miners profitable with one assured bitcoins with every new block.

I'm sure that some [certain cartel] won't exist and be alive when we reach the point needed to change the units. besides didn't some other [Chinese cartel] already increased the total number by x2 3 weeks ago? I guess if it's their cartel it's all good but when it comes to our cartel it's all stinky right? :D