Bitcoin Forum

Why would the code of bitcoins be so of which limits the total amount, Or what ever is causing this to be so. Would a market of bitcoins with an infinite amount of possible bitcoins not be better? Wallstreet flucuates, Yet it hold to a limitless currency. There is no pre-set limit to an currency of any country. Something my be bought for a trillion dollars, Why should something not be able to be bought for a trillion bitcoins?

yes, the currency is issued at a relatively fixed rate.  there is source code which issues it in this manner:
 https://en.bitcoin.it/w/images/en/e/e3/Total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png (http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/File:Total_bitcoins_over_time_graph.png)


some agree.  some don't.  perhaps bitcoins arent't for you.  might the u.s. dollar be ineresting to you instead?

due to the generation of btc being coupled to energy consumption i think it makes sense to not attribute 50btc/10 minutes in 20 years from now. imagine how big mining would grow if each lucky winner gets worth 10,000,000$.

I would favour 10-20% volume growth distributed evenly to all participants per year (right now we are at 30%/a distributed based on CPU) but agree that in a peer to peer anonymous system there is no way of implementing that.

We need a lot of mining to keep the currency secure. It's the computing capacity of the honest miners exceed that of any attackers that prevents double spending.

That would be 100% equivalent to doing nothing at all. If everyone's bitcoin amount goes up 20%, nothing has changed. It's the same as creating a new unit, say the BITCoin equivalent to .833 bitcoins and pretending all accounts are in that units. "I have 1 bitcoin." and "I have 1.2 BITcoins" mean the same thing.

Take Bitcoin's code and create an open source currency without a limit. See if it catches on.

Yes, but we achieve this goal with 10,000$/10minutes already. It's ecologically insane to put 1000x the amount of resources into mining.

Huh? No! "distributed evenly to all participants" is not equal to everyones BTC going up by x%. What I'm suggesting is that with 1M participants and 1M BTC in circulation, every non-miner gets 0.2BTC in that year regardless of what he had before. Actually if there were a proof of being a person I would do as follows:
* everybody gets 1BTC + 1.1^time (in years since start of the currency) BTC
* miners get their fraction of another 1.1^time BTC
* a person joining after the 3rd year would start off with 1+1.331BTC.
* The average miner will have 1+1.331+1.331BTC
* Those doing business will have significantly more but also have an incentive to spend over time their 5BTC would become 15 while the other guy with 1.1331 would have 11.1331 by then.

(Some guy had suggested to connect DNA with BTC addresses somehow but this way everybody who finds one of my hairs would be able to capture any further income ... Proof of being a living person is not feasible anonymously without solving captchas non stop.)

Do the developers possess the power to arbitrarily raise the final bitcoin amount (later on)?

That is an excellent question. If it is possible (and since plenty of people have suggested forking the project to those who want to remove the cap, I assume it is), I doubt it would be used, since doing so would ruin the point of Bitcoin.

No, this is a common misunderstanding - developers don't possess any power except that of nomination.

The network has to come to a consensus about any change in rules. The developers could change the client to change one of these rules, and people would vote by using that client, or keeping the old one (or forking the old client to keep updating it without the rule change). It's actually happened before.

Your client will reject any block chain that doesn't conform to the rules as it understands them - so a massive change in rules will simply fork the blockchain into two different chains, obviously with the most popular chain being the one people use but it's entirely plausible to end up with two distinct networks that started out as Bitcoin itself.

So there's pretty much no incentive for the developers to make such a drastic change to the rules unless it's obvious the community would be 99% behind them. So everyone who tells you "well the developers hold all the power so it's not decentralized" doesn't grok Bitcoin at all.

Regarding forking the block chain, this is interesting. Would the new chain always start at zero? could it be used as a more local version of a currency? Would it have an independent supply rate?

If you have some reference to point me to I would appreciate that!

you can fork the block chain at 0 and for introducing an alternative currency that's the only way that would make sense i guess..

i think it might be fun to see what happens if a subset of the community decides to accept only blocks with ... an "@" as a prefix but based on the existing block chain.
such a change would render these blocks invalid for the rest of the clients. conversely the @-subchain would contain all transactions prior to the fork and, if enough people love @, people would accept coins from that chain so effectively I could double spend all coins that were mined before the fork by spending them here and there. wonder if there is a use case for such a scenario :)

The new chain works in any way that it is programmed to work in the modified software. You could write software that requires a new chain, or you could write software that branches off the existing chain by applying the current rules up to a certain block number and new rules (e.g. a different generation rate) for later blocks.

I think it will be extremely difficult to attract a large number of users to any branch of the existing chain.

Why do people complain about Bitcoin not being inflationary with the amount of inflationary currencies around the world? Almost all of them are inflationary. Its not like you dont have a choice...

Yea, seems people have been preprogrammed to want more of the same.  Spoon or the Fork.

Fork the spoon.

But inevitably, there is no spoon.  It's what you make of it.

In a sense, Bitcoins do not actually have a limit.

If the market grows big, and more is printed you are essentially stealing from those who already hold bitcoin because you are diluting their coins.

But instead the decimal point can be moved over so that you have 10x the # of bitcoins, of course each bitcoin is now worth 1/0 of the original price.  This way we always have enough, but no one has their funds diluted.

Not quite. The decimal is never moved. 1 bitcoin will always be 1 bitcoin. but if we 'run out', we can start denominating prices in smaller increments. ie, .1 BTC instead of 1.0 Essentially, every bitcoin is now worth 10x more (at least at that store, there's no central bank deciding that)

There is a fundamental difference between a central bank issuing new currency and a p2p network asking for the issuance of new currency. One relies on those in power to determine what's best; the other is based on demand. But sure, they are the same thing. Inflation is the debilllll and so on.

The FAQ says otherwise: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_generated,_what_happens_when_Bitcoins_are_lost?_Won_t_that_be_a_problem? (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ#But_if_no_more_coins_are_generated,_what_happens_when_Bitcoins_are_lost?_Won_t_that_be_a_problem?)

I stand corrected. But that is so far in the future as to be a non-issue. In the short term, we'll use smaller denominations. Moving the decimal would require a re-write of the client, and would likely cause a fork, as above.

It is a figure or speech. It does not mean anything. Actual implementation will be decided later. I think most people are in favor of leaving a bitcoin where it is and using a different denomination, like a microbitcoin, as the default.

Yes, it is very far off, but I wouldn't consider it an issue, but a solution.  Many people are afraid Bitcoins will become obsolete when they hit 21 million, and that people will not want to pay 0.00000015 for a drink or some such thing.  It makes it more aesthetically pleasing to move the decimal point over.

A figure of speech a simile or a metaphor, or some thing not meant to be taken literally.  The way it is written is not figurative.

Yes, it's not set in stone, but it is still a possibility that is being discussed seriously.  And considering transferring "0.00000001" bitcoins would turn people away, and there is no real reason not to move the decimal place over, it will probably happen.

When I think of switch to a mircobitcoin or what-have-you as the default denomination, I would call it "shifting the decimal place". When I call it that, it is simply a figure of speech as bitcoins are still bitcoins.

It's more of a display thing. If people don't want to pay .00000015 BTC for a drink, they can pay 15 Satoshis (That sounds about right, by the way, for an outrageously priced bar drink;) )

I think eventually there will be a Big Mac index, where the price of a Big Mac will fluctuate between 1.5 and 1.8 Satoshis.  :)

Read: Everything will be denominated in Big Macs!

Fixed. As others have pointed out, the reference to "shifting the decimal point" was metaphorical.

One thing that bothers me about the choice of the 21M top is that if you expect the whole world population to use bitcoins, then only very few people will be able to own even 1 BTC.
It would be better to right shift the decimal point right now, rather than when/if Bitcoine becomes more mainstream.

Anyone can have their client display whatever (sub) multiple of Bitcoin he wishes. The reference implementation is free software an anyone is welcome to modify it or make one from scratch. Non-programmers can hire a programmer.

Go ahead, stop crying and modify your client and distribute a patch.

If they did that though, even though it wouldn't warrant any market change in the slightest, would probably scare a few people who didn't understand it and destabilize the market even more.


It wouldn't work well unless everyone was using the same standard.

I think it's safe to assume that if you're smart enough to modify your client to use a different base unit, you have the processing power to do a quick decimal conversion.

Um, you want inflation to be built into the system so that something can be bought for 1trn btc? ???

Go to the developer forum and you'll see some guy is offering Bitcoins to developers to help him start up his own blockchain and corresponding client, and miners to help him mine the new currency (he calls it Groupcoin).  So anyone can do it, but just because you can doesn't mean they'll be worth anything.  Bitcoin is worth something because it has a large number of people on board.  People have a hard time understanding this.  I think the Groupcoin founder believes he's going to get rich and spread wealth to all the developers who help him (and some are).  But before you invest your hard-earned Bitcoins in Groupcoins, remember that Bitcoin is worth something because of the number of people who use it, not because of some secure P2P accounting system, brilliant though it may be.

Bitcoins are divisible to infinity. Technically you can divide 1 Bitcoin between millions of people if they ever become worth that much.

This is not a manner of a elementry school, It does not matter if it is "fair" to mine bitcoins, And receive so very many dollars from it. What matters is this limit is idiotic. There is no need for it, And it will cause the eventual demise of bitcoins, For bitcoins will become as any other currency. I must buy bitcoins in order to receive them in place of mining them, And this will discourage many. If this occurs, Bitcoins will become somewhat a stock market, You can buy bitcoins when the value drops, And sell them when it increases, Yet you cannot add to this by mining bitcoins, Thus the use decreases, And the value.

The idea is not to make a stock exchange, but a currency. People don't whine about not being able to print dollars (or pound notes), they just do a job to get some.

The only reason people are getting involved is because they know that there is a limit. Who in their right mind would invest in something that will be diluted infinitely? The price of bitcoins would still be at $0.001 if there was an infinite supply. An infinite supply mean that no matter the demand, the price is going to be tiny, because there will always be more. The current price is from people speculating on future demand given a finite supply.

tl;dr -- No on would invest in bitcoin if there were an infinite amount of them. I know I wouldn't.

How do you plan to do that?. Bitcoin is decentralized. It's naive to assume you can get clients to follow a same standard regarding the user interface. Even regarding the protocol, there will be broken implementations. You can't but invite people to use the denomination of your preference.


The first is just your opinion (Which is fine), the later is misleading and untrue, because demand could rise with supply, bear human population growing rate in mind.

Yes, you are right. It all depends on the growth rate vs adoption rate I suppose. I guess there could be no limit but it grows really slowly. If it grew linearly, we would almost be in the same position as now, as growth is expected to be exponential in the long term (even if also small). But still, I don't think people would look at small growth, or linear growth the same way they look at a fixed amount. Psychologically speaking, I know I am getting a permanent piece of the pie when I buy/mine bitcoins, and that is why I do it.

Complete bullshit. DamienBlack said it right already but I'm even stronger opposed to that.
If there was a way to grant 50*1.1^time in years btc per person (that is every user would be granted 50btc for 2009, 55 for 2010, ... no matter when he joins), I would be fine with that, too. This mechanism would make bitcoin more of a currency. now it is only a store of value.

i bought at 9$ and i'm not an early adopter with thousands of btc so i value those btc i have much higher than people trade them on mtGox. on the other hand I doubt the btc will survive as a save haven for all of my savings so i'm stuck with some coins neither bold enough to buy more nor to use them at the MtGox rate. A predefined rate of infinite exponential growth would help a lot. With the money being attributed to persons, people would not turn their back to bitcoin knowing they have some fresh coins every year (month/block). unfortunately this reward per person instead of per proof of work doesn't work in an anonymous decentralized system.

Do you understand why there are countries in tens of trillions of fiat currency debt? Do understand why quantitative easing (i.e. increasing the money supply - to try and mend a system that's beyond repair, no less) devalues a currency? Do you understand what a growing and infinite supply does to the value of a currency? Do you understand what happened to the currencies of the Weimer Republic in the 1920s and Zimbabwe in the last decade?

Do you understand that there are two main people who get into bitcoin? i.e. those who understand the above and want to not only maintain their purchasing power, but improve it with time (nothing idiotic about that); and those who just want to make a quick buck because they heard some people already made shit loads  of money, and even though they don't understand the how or why of the deflationary nature what they're getting into works.

The latter should probably just stick to fiat currency as it already does exactly what they want - offer a limitless supply of money.

Please tell me, what is the different between transferring money into PayPal to buy stuff with PayPal, and transferring money into MtGox/TradeHill to buy stuff with Bitcoin?

I agree with this but realize you are arguing with people who disagree with you.  Bitcoin is not going to change.  Rather than complain about bitcoin which is not going to change for you, look into building something new.  My suggestion is the scheme outlined here, a bitcoin-like currency but where every miner has very precise control over what he will accept in a block, and what he will include in a generation.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24929.20

Also the people who believe letting coins be mined infinitely mean they all become worth less are misunderstanding something: the coins cost money to mine.  Letting them be mined infinitely just means their value won't exceed their cost to produce.  It's basically like some kind of coin for which we have infinite materlal, but actually turning them into coins is expensive.  Unfortunately I think most on this forum don't understand this so it's not really worth arguing.

Fallacy. As I said elsewhere - I can make tiny statues from my shit that take a really long time to make, will you buy them?

The artificial scarcity imposed by coins with an arbitrary limit gives them their value - no one buying them gives a shit how much it cost you to mine them.