Bitcoin Forum

Some cryptocurrencies have hundreds of billions of coins while others have just a couple million or fewer.  So, what determines the overall amount of a currency?  Do devs just randomly pick a number that sounds good, or is there a functionality factor to have so many/few coins? 

Hello

It depends from a coin and project. If it is shitcoin as most of coins, number of total supply is picked randomly. If it is a good developed project team should have reasonable explanation why they need this number. You can check whitepaper of a project, of course if it has WP at all.   

It all comes down to the developers of the coins and what they decide. Overall though, the smaller amount of coins available the greater the price, which comes down to supply and demand. If we look at Ripple for example (XRP), total coins is 1 billion and the supply of coins is a lot greater than the demand, which keeps the price pretty low with not my fluctuations ($.17-$.23 last month or so).

Yes a Dev will pick a number according to what he or she is looking for and they will adjust this according to the inflation of the coin as well as it's use. It also depends on if there will be any niring of the coin and of the coin is going to be given out and how much for bounties.

Dang that's crazy.  
I'm going to use Verge (XVG) as an example.  They currently have 16.5 billion coins.  Is it possible they could burn their total coins down to a billion or even down to 500 million?  From what I can tell they don't appear to be a sh!tcoin and have a great project.  I just can't get my head wrapped around why they would choose to have 16.5 billions coins as opposed to 100 million.

I have seen that if a coin has less supply, it has good price

I too tend to agree with this in a vacuum. However, some coins with large supplies are meaningful and do offer some value. One incoming ICO just made 1 trillion tokens lets see

how that one goes.

From Wikipedia:

"Speculated justifications for the unintuitive value "21 million" are that it matches a 4-year reward halving schedule; or the ultimate total number of Satoshis that will be mined is close to the maximum capacity of a 64-bit floating point number."

This is very simple factors.
Remember if developers often change their minds about future of specific coins you can never be sure that limit cap of coins they create won't be higher by factor of 100x in future.

Its no easy task to invest, bitcoin is safest.

Smart ICOs pick a number that they think is realistic to put an ICO in the sweet spot. People may be more inclined to buy an ico if it's worth, let's say...15$ then 800$ or 0.15$

First many coins get their price in their ICO and the supply is made by them and for now i don't know how they supply their coins but the things i said is the reason why their price is there.

Personally I'm not quite happy with ICO coins, most of them will be dumped by higher investors, in theoretical less supply easier to pump the price but it's not quite true as community and dev is the main palyer.