Bitcoin Forum

Only 21 million Bitcoins can be mined in total. Currently, about 18 million of them have been already mined. Moreover, according to studies, 5 million Bitcoins (or even more) are lost forever.
I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption, so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

A change to Bitcoin's total supply would require a hard fork; which obviously, a lot of people are against(both with hard forks and increasing of supply). So you might as well say it's next to impossible.

How is it not enough? Bitcoin is highly highly divisible. If you can't buy one whole bar of gold, then you buy a gram of it. Same thing with bitcoin. As bitcoin's price goes higher and as bitcoin gets widely used for merchant payments, probably expect us to be using the "satoshi" or "sats" denomination sometime in the future.

Limited supply is very important principle of Bitcoin philosophy. Bitcoin is volatile, but it also has been deflationary throughout its life.

Perhaps you would explain why you believe that 2100000000000000 satoshis (that's 2100000000000000000 millisatoshis for those using the Lightning Network) is not enough.

Of course it's possible.

It's getting everyone to agree to it that'll be the very, very, very, very hard part.

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

You could have a scrip issue - everyone with a bitcoin gets 9 more ( say ), and that would raise the pool to 210 million, but each would be worth 1/10 of the value. But what would be the point? I can see the day when Satoshi is the unit of exchange, and Bitcoin is the name of the currency. Rather like Sterling and the pound, and the Renminbi and the Yuan.

The only way they might convince someone to do it is if they promote the "21 million Bitcoins aren't enough to the world's population" idea.

But if we think it thoroughly, why would it be a problem if.. say through a hard fork the new Max Supply would be multiplied by x100 (so 2,100,000,000BTC max) and everyone has their balance multiplied x100 simultaneously? If Bitcoin is going to stay in the top as the beast of all cryptocurrencies, it would even with this hard fork happening, right?

I think the number of 21 million is just a deceptive view. An illusion. And there is never a need to play with this number.
So there is no need to fork or anything else to increase BTC amount.

Yes, indeed. The real number is the number of satoshis, which approaches 21 million x 100 million. Once you start thinking in satoshis you can see there are plenty of them to do anything. Not sure about the LN further subdivision.

Realistically bitcoins are way too expensive for anything but expensive things, like property, cars, etc. But as someone said, the bitcoin itself is just a cosmetic unit of measure shown in wallets, just like the mBTC, the real one being the satoshi.

Somewhere it was defined 100 million satoshis make a bitcoin, but because this is not in code, we could redefine this without touching anything beyond the cosmetic units displayed. Everyone would just want to agree and that is that.

They could say: "starting tomorrow, the bitcoin is no longer 100 million, but 1 million satoshis." Then those owning 1 bitcoin yesterday tomorrow can say they have 100 bitcoin under the new denomination (1 million satoshis). Obviously if the bitcoin is 10000 USD then it would cost to 100 USD to remain the same, since its the number of satoshis what actually matters.

I wonder if people would get really confused by this? They do that often with fiat that go hyperinflation, not that it means anything beyond "human convenience" for expressing price of things etc. While governments can do that to fiat by decree, i wonder how would the community react to such?

I personally don't mind, but "larger supply" (as in more satoshis) is absolutely not needed.

Well, that what makes the price to always skyrocket. When a product is scarce, what is the result? We can have a fraction of Bitcoin and there will be no need to increase the protocol.

If I remember correctly, Peter Todd was advocating of removing the 21 million supply cap for bitcoin to have a forever 1% inflation for security purposes. Though his explanation was somewhat reasonable(though I'm not for it), and even though he is a very reputable personality in the bitcoin space, a lot of people disagreed and laughed at the idea. It just shows how changing things this big is very very unlikely to happen.

wrong.
this is not based "studies", this is based on "guesses" and there is a big difference. basically all of them are considering any coin that has not moved for N days as "lost" that is why the numbers they report is so huge. the reality is that there are many who have been buying and holding (me included) coins for long term but they all still have full control over their keys.

"thinking" that is not enough, if some day in the future we really saw that the supply (whatever it was at the time) weren't enough then by that time we could change the supply to solve that problem.

he never actually advocated for it. he just said (https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/697532042553065472) bitcoin should have been implemented that way. he knows that it would never happen!

the btc code is not measuring the tokens in BTC. infact the code is measuring it in 'satoshi's'

the 'btc' is just a basket term for 100,000,000 satoshis.

the core team of devs are actually thinking of changing things to actually have 1000x more tokens per btc basket name.

yep 100,000,000,000 tokens per btc instead of 100,000,000
though this can cause alot of problems and alot of possible bugs and issues. they still want to try it one day.

i fond it absolutely foolish to do this. as much as i find it foolish to increase the number of 'btc's' which previous teams talked about doing years ago.

things should stay as they are with BTC remaining with a 21mill BTC limit and each BTC having 100mill sats.

2.100,000,000,000,000 tokens splitable/sharable currently is more than enough

It is pretty exciting to see bitcoin opening its protocol to adopt new improvements and to better fit the needs of the people, but what makes bitcoin the best is its consistency. If bitcoin will have a larger supply, its demand will not increase that much, resulting for people to see bitcoin to end its characteristic to provide better profits in terms of investment. In addition, we just made bitcoin untrustworthy when in the end, we could change its protocol.

1 satoshi equalling 1 cent would be a 1 million dollar Bitcoin. Nice problem to have.

It's possible you could have more units on a second layer since that would be the quasi cash. It would only hit the main chain when rounded up into much larger amounts anyway.

People don't make critical decisions in software with millions of user just because they "think" that something should be done, you need to make a proper scientific research where you defend your conjecture with facts, statistically significant data, mathematical calculations, etc.

In theory it can be changed with a fork but miners will be against it

When I see a question like this posted by a beginner, the first thing that comes to my mind is actually the classic thinking of the average person who thinks that if the total amount of something goes up that the price of the same will go down. If by some miracle the total supply would increase from 21 million, this would definitely cause the price to fall not only because of increased supply but for lack of confidence in BTC.

There are things that need to stay just the way the creator put them, for everything else there are forks of BTC. Not even them (at least the more famous ones) did not interfere with total supply.

That's a reasonable approximation.


Fortunately, Bitcoin doesn't care what you think. Bitcoin is a voluntary system, if you don't like it, don't use bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a voluntary system.

Bitcoin is just a number.  If 21 million Bitcoins isn't enough, then how about 21 billion millibitcoin?

If 21 billion millibitcoin isn't enough, then how about 21 trillion microbitcoin?

If 21 trillion microbitcoin isn't enough, then how about 21 quadrillion nanobitcoin?

If 21 quadrillion nanobitcoin isn't enough, then how about 21 quintillion picobitcoin?

See, that's the surprising thing about numbers, they can always be divided resulting in smaller numbers.


Effectively, yes.  However, we can use ever smaller portions of those bitcoin as needed.

I agree with others who've mentioned that there's no need for it. I suppose that it's potentially possible to change the supply, but it would be close to impossible to reach consensus rather than create another 'Bitcoin', some of which we already have. The larger supply is not a problem right now since we have Satoshis. Scalability is a problem that should be dealt with. Not everyone recognizes or agrees to use the LN, and without it what we now call micro-transactions are very costly and take a lot of time. The real problem is that if Bitcoin costs even more and the network gets way busier, $100 transactions also would not make sense (this was the case in 2017 during the ATH) and then the issue can expand. There might be a time when we need to think of dividing Satoshis (the LN already does it, though), but we are not even close to that point IMO, and might never even reach it.

I see no point in increasing the cap of Bitcoin. The main characteristic of Bitcoin is for it to have a fixed supply and thus a stable deflationary model. For the coin cap to be changed, it would ruin that characteristic of Bitcoin and it probably would never garner enough support.

It's much more viable to increase the denomination of Bitcoin though I never imagine there would actually ever be a need for that.

I first registered to this forum almost 8 years back. Ever since then I am seeing threads like this one, which makes little sense. Why don't people understand that one of the key strengths of Bitcoin is the controlled supply principle? People like me invested in Bitcoin, because it is protected from inflation as a result of the controlled supply algorithm. You mess up with this, and Bitcoin will become similar to fiat currency. I understand that the miners would be happy to get an increased block reward, but my opinion is that they need to look for other options.

I think alot of new people are confused and don't realise that "You don't need to buy a full Bitcoin", and they have no idea you can buy it in partial amounts. Most likely the reason for this is how the stock market operates. The price for Amazon stock is currently $2000, so you need to have at least $2000 to buy one share. If you have $1000 you can't own any Amazon stock. Hence why sometimes there are stock splits where the supply goes up 10x but the price goes down 0.1 so the stock price becomes $200 and more affordable.

With bitcoin this isn't needed since the units are down to a Satoshi and this is what most people don't understand. If the supply is increased or even possible to adjust then what is the point of Bitcoin really? It will be like fiat which had bad inflation and loses massive value overtime.

Currently 21 Million BTC  with satoshi units is enough for the entire planet to use.

Well.. this is another important issue that has been ignored by the core team for quite a long time. A huge number of people believe that in order to purchase Bitcoin, you need to buy one full BTC. A lot of awareness campaigns were taken out, with limited outcome. I had proposed to redenominate the BTC some years back. Each of the existing (old) Bitcoins should be replaced with 1,000 new coins. The total circulating supply will increase to 21 billion from 21 million. A lot of people argued that Satoshi is already there and we don't need redenomication. But the issue is that Satoshi is too small to be used as an unit. As of now the price of one Satoshi is just $0.000094 and it is very difficult to use that unit.

I think this is impossible. many will object because the crowd only wants to retain the original properties of bitcoin. But do not worry about the supply, this is a digital asset so it can be broken down and everyone can keep their share. It's not like our fiat money, we can't tear it apart to split it into smaller value, but bitcoin is. To make this easier, more halving events should take place and the price of bitcoin will rise and make bitcoin more and more valuable. Meanwhile, 0.1 bitcoin can also buy a house. ;D

No offense intended but I don't think it is a very bright idea to increase the coins by tenfold. Its a more viable option to just divide the coins smaller than satoshi.

You don't have to use satoshi as an unit either. Just use mBTC as a more suitable denomination. There is no issue with the denomination until a satoshi becomes equivalent to a dollar. I really don't see the point behind increasing the supply instead of increasing the denomination.

How is it not enough? 100,000,000 satoshis can be made out of a single Bitcoin? Even comparing to USD, and giving 100 satoshi an equivalence to 1.00 USD (accounting for the decimal places), it would be 1 BTC = 1,000,000 USD.

$18m BTC would be 18 trillion USD, which is far more enough, considering the total money globally is somewhere only at 5 trillion USD.

Where did you get the information that there is only a $5 trillion? The annual budget of the US is only slightly less than that amount, and there is around $37 trillion in circulation (data from 2019 (https://www.rankred.com/how-much-money-is-there-in-the-world/)).

There is really no problem with the final supply of 21 million Bitcoins, and there is no point in trying to change that at all. If that ever happens, Bitcoin will no longer be what it used to be, change would shake the very foundations on which the whole project was built, and would probably collapse over time. In fact, a Pandora's box would open and confidence would disappear like fog on a spring morning.

Why wouldn't the 21Million BTC be enough?
We don't need a whole BTC we could use Sat's so why wouldn't be enough if 1BTC=100M sats just imagine how many Sats would it be for the whole 21M supply.
Even if there are some BTC that is lost forever a sat could always have a price so there wouldn't be a problem on the supply.

In addition, IMO, it is somehow the pride of BTC to remain and to become consistent to what it is right from the start. Having a limited supply for bitcoin also build up  trust for people who are willing to spend huge amount of time for investment, and basically, changing the total supply of bitcoin would just mean that bitcoin isn't worth the trust of people and just the same with other crypto that has an infinite supply.

So far, what drives bitcoin's market price to increase this high is its scarcity that many newbies want to increase.

well indeed the supply of bitcoin can never be added or subtracted again because the supply of bitcoin is valid only available 21 million pieces of bitcoin and imagine if everyone in the world is trying to have bitcoin then the price of bitcoin will be very expensive because it will be increasingly difficult to get bitcoin.

It's not true that it can't be technically done, it's a code that I assume is easy to change, but the whole thing would require the hard fork and consensus of most of the crypto community.

Some people know the theory that there are 36 million millionaires in the world, and that if everyone wanted at least 1 BTC it would not be enough for everyone. This is certainly true, but it is a millionaires problem, not the problem of Bitcoin. Every day there are at least 1 million BTC available in the market, anyone can buy and sell, the market is open 24 hours a day.

A fork is actually a 'changed Bitcoin'. So yeah, you can change it, but the next question is whether the network accepts or adopt it or not. If not, then your 'new Bitcoin' will fail.

Bitcoin supply is 'huge' already. As Danny pointed out, you can divide it into smaller numbers. Whether those small numbers worth something or not would be answered in the next few years. Surely this supply thing would no longer be a problem when 100 sats are equal to a dollar or something similar.

Bitcoin does have a slight limit. And this is the condition of the beginning of bitcoin, they did deliberately set a bitcoin supply of 21 million. I think this is the reason why many new cryptocurrencies we can now see on  Coinmarketap (https://coinmarketcap.com/). If in this world there are only bitcoins used for various needs, the price of bitcoin is really very difficult to control and set Sideway position. In addition, other altcoins also serve to improve what Bitcoin cannot do. So cryptocurrency looks more perfect in the future.

I don't think that it is possible and I don't see any reason for a larger supply.
I think everyone could have a part of it in the future 1 Bitcoin could be divided into 100 Million sats.
But I think it would really drive the price up when all of the BTC has been mined since we have so many lost BTC and not to mention those who are holding a huge amount of BTC.
I think when that time comes 1 Sat would have a good value.

That is bullshit, if everyone is using just bitcoin and not the  other alt coins then we would have been a much bigger market with everyone trying to make things better for bitcoin rather than making their own subsidiary coin to make money when they can. To be frank i would be happy if he had just one coin.

Tell me some altcoins that will serve you better than bitcoin with the same level of transaction volume, anon coins is a different case altogether as it provides you the privacy, other than that you do not need thousands of coins.

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@OP the doubt is cleared by all the responses you got and i am sure we will not see the developers messing with the supply cap ;).

If 1 sat would have a good value, then you better have a lot of money in your wallet because you're going to pay a lot for a transaction fee!

I don't get it, my question has never been answered before: If Bitcoin ever has a spectacular price increase and 1 satoshi would have "a good value", how will we handle the tx fees? As I suggested a while ago, BTC's supply should stay the same but it should be split into more than just 100 million pieces. We need a lower denomination before a satoshi would be worth a lot.

On the other side though, would miners ever accept a.. say 1 satoshi fee per tx if 1 satoshi was $1, no matter what the size of the transaction is?

Upvote for not changing it. The others have already said it, BTC has and can be used in smaller amounts. Supply is completely not a problem. If some BTC gets lost, then that would probably make the price go higher since the supply became less, and in the end, the community would then again use it in smaller amounts for everyday transactions. If, and only if, every BTC out there was lost, then possibly, enthusiasts would probably do something to fix it, but the chances of that happening are much closer to an impossibility rather than a possibility.
 
Losing BTC due to wallets being lost or owners forgetting passwords and what not isn't really anything new. It is finite, yes, but you can also use it infinitely, approaching the number of 0, but never really reaching it. Unless, that is, all coins are lost.

Bitcoin protocol could be changed which will allow for a larger supply but thinking about the perspective of the users and miners, I don't think it will be that easy to do. Because,
(a) For the new protocol to take place, every user and miner has to adapt to the new mode and
(b) If Bitcoin is more prevalent, the price of it will go really low from as it is now, which will be barely accepted by the community.

People should really look up this way.They do just focus on that 21M overall supply and do treat that 21M whole coins would be on circulation in time of full adoption
without even thinking that it can be breakdown into small units.As said the supply is just really sufficient and theres no need for some protocol change just to increase or do
ask for larger supply. I agree on what you have said about those shitty forked btc coins out there, they havent been even supported even they are much better when it comes to
specs compared to btc itself.