Bitcoin Forum

Why did Satoshi Nakamoto create the Bitcoin protocol with 21,000,000 coins, and not with 50,000,000 or 100,000,000,000 for example?
P.S. Happy New Year, Bitcoin and Cryptocommunity!! :) :) :) I wish everyone a passing trend, happiness, health! :)

2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshi fit in a floating point "double" with two bits to spare. This allows programs to use standard numeric code libraries without worrying about truncation errors - there's enough to have a rounding bit and a guard bit. In contrast, Litecoin's 8,400,000,000,000,000 Satoshi is right on the limit.

Try these steps in a calculator on your desktop computer:

2100000000000000 [multiply] 4 [equals] [minus] 1 [equals] [divide] 4 [equals]
2100000000000000 [multiply] 8 [equals] [minus] 1 [equals] [divide] 8 [equals]

On my computer, the first calculates 2099999999999999.75 showing than no precision was lost. The second produces the original number showing that the "subtract one" was lost.

Now try these:

2099999999999999 [divide] 3 [equals] [multiply] 3 [equals]
8399999999999999 [divide] 3 [equals] [multiply] 3 [equals]

The first returns me to the original value, the second doesn't! This means that a Litecoin like limit would need careful handling of numbers.

Satoshi Nakamoto started a new era of CPU wars between miners that keeps hardware manufactures happy
and the 90KWH of electric need to store a mere 250 bytes on the block-chain is keeping big oil happy.

Bankers have seized the miners and now operate a monopoly as can be seen here
https://blockchain.info/pools
so the bankers can now charge $45 per transaction which has sent the BTC price downwards
as the fees went up as they try to lock people in.

The system does not scale and the same developers who built the system are now saying that they
can fix it with LN but that's centralized hubs and we know that this is a four letter swear word
to our founding leader mr Satoshi Nakamoto who dumped a white-paper on a forum one day
and is smarter than Bernard Madoff because he has made off already.

Now he did mention how 21m coins would prevent inflation along with a load of other clap-trap
but each fork doubles the money supply so lets call that anything but inflation.

Thankfully other systems coming on-line have dumped mining, PoW and developers can understand how
to design a system that will scale to 1000s of transactions per second and not just seven like
we have with BTC and we need 20,000 full nodes apparently just to do this.

I get the trustless part, Satoshi  was looking in the mirror when he came up with it and I am sorry
because I don't have time to explain how trust is established in a networks we use today or how
it does not lead to full blown centralization but i am sure some smart developers here can work it out.

Hitler too was loved in Germany during the early 1930's and Satoshi Nakamoto will end up being
condemned to the history books with a name not much better than Adolf when the wheels fall of
this wagon and gamblers are left asking how could this ever happen to them.

 
 
 

Keep this as record

I will support few alt coins as usual - utk, cmt

What Codewench said.

it's just a good number, fits all the currencies in the world nicely... 2.1 quadrillion is plenty to fit all inflationary currencies in a deflationary one. :)

If he spend a big amount in bitcoin because he know very good that is good investment but in this uptrend that he do before it will take time to be again in up like before but I think 2018 it will be a big year for bitcoin and can reach 60K easily

I think it will hit $6.00 maybe lower and my argument is just as good as yours.

If Bitcoin remains a small niche, it'll be worth less per unit than existing currencies. If you imagine it being used for some fraction of world commerce, then there's only going to be  21.000.000 coin for the whole world, so it would be worth much more per unit. Values are 64-bit integers with 8 decimal places, so 1 coin is represented internally as 100000000. There's plenty of granularity if typical prices become small.

other reason- I think Satoshi Nakamoto Know that teanger will use this coin and he set 21 Number in it...

other reason - According to scientists, the human soul weighs 21 grams ...

Very elegant explanations provided already.  I am going to have to bookmark this thread.  Satoshi was a true visionary and planned Bitcoin out flawlessly.  As others have explained the "halving" is the reason a dividable number of bitcoins had to be selected, so it became 21 million.

Yes, because he wasn’t a very good C Coder and used the C++ standard library. That’s not to say it can’t be changed in the future with very little effort. That would fracture Bitcoin though and create two “bitcoins” confusing users and fucking bitcoin for all time so it’s very doubtful that would happen. If you’re a coder you should take a look at Blitz++. It’s pretty cool.

Thank you for the explanation. Sounds logical. The total coins does not matter much as each coin is dividable into 8 decimal places.