Bitcoin Forum

So there are 21 million total because that is how it was coded. Will it be possible to increase the supply or even make it infinite if someone was able to crack the code?

Anyone can crack the code. Just modify the block interval or the block rewards and you'll be able to increase the max supply. Problem is, due to your different block intervals (and as a result of the difficulty) and/or your different block rewards, you'll either reject the blocks generated by the network sooner or later. Effectively, you're forking Bitcoin. As a result, you're running a different Bitcoin with different rules that no one follow excepts you.

If you persuade everyone to follow your fork and replace the current Bitcoin, the effectively max cap would be raised. If no one wants to follow, nothing happens for everyone else.

Isn't about a user cracking the code, to apply a change on the network then more than 50% of the nodes should run with that change. In theory, this could be possible, but more than 50% of the people should be agreed with this idea and that's the complex part.

When governments print more money the coins lose their value, that could happen to bitcoin if a fork like that comes.

So, my answer is, yes, it can be manipulated but it will never happen.

It's not about modifying the block. The sole reason why this doesn't work is due to the fact that the Bitcoin nodes enforces the rules individually. Any deviation from the rules will not be accepted, even if the block is valid for the most part. Modifying any block would make it invalid regardless.

Nope. It is just not possible to crack it.

Yes this can happen very easily even you can do it but please don’t call it Bitcoin any more.

You can name it like Bitcoin 2,  Bitcoin 3, Bitcoin Pure Gold, Silver, Bronze, Bitcoin Titanium in fact a quick search reveals there are almost 113+ variants of Bitcoin existing. With different supply, block reward, block timing or difficulty.

In short you don’t need to crack the code, code is available online it’s an open source project you just need the community to agree to your change and your proposal and you are good to go.
Here’s the git repository of the Bitcoin source code
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin

A change, misuse, or hack of the protocol (call it whatever you want) has already happened in 2010. That later became known as the overflow bug. One user noticed a bug in Bitcoin's codebase and used that opportunity to generate 184 billion bitcoin. But because the network didn't work as it was initially configured to do, this was quickly fixed by satoshi and the bitcoin developers because those generated bitcoins didn't follow a previously laid out emission plan.

You can read more about the overflow bug here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=822.0
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=823.0

Isn't manipulating the supply called forking? As far as I know, bitcoin supply can be manipulated but it wouldn't be the same because bitcoin supply is already set in stone and any further changes has to happen when it was still in development.

There is a possibility of course. But you shouldn't forget that you will be forking Bitcoin when you try to do such thing. And that means you need the majority to use your version. And I don't think the majority of people would like to support such thing. Because let's say you increased the max supply. But then the price will also go down and Bitcoin will be less valuable.

There is no code to crack. Anyone can make changes to the Bitcoin Protocol, but full nodes have to accept the changes and I doubt that it will ever happen.... also once the changes has been done, people will have to use that implementation and that will also not happen.

An increase in the Supply will de-valuate the coins that are now owned by people and that is one of the major reasons why they will not accept this change.  ;)

The protocol is code, but 1000's of full nodes has to accept the new fork for it to be implemented.  ;)

This is one of the questions that people often ask, because it is difficult for them to understand who and in what way controls this limit. Max supply is one of the trademarks associated with Bitcoin, something the vast majority agree on as something not to be touched, and fortunately developers working on improvements to existing protocols agree on it.

Yet those who think they are late to buy cheap often resort to this idea as something that would of course bring down the price and allow everyone to buy BTC cheap. But one such change of protocol would not only have short-term consequences, because who would ever believe after that it would not happen again? I believe that BTC would lose its place as the leading cryptocurrency in the event of such nonsense, and all those who have criticized it over the years would begin to celebrate the fall of the king from the throne.

Yes. You can fork Bitcoin Core to increase the block subsidy logic or it's block intervals. It is never really set in stone; any changes to the consensus rules which is incompatible with other clients results in a hard fork. This means that someone can create a new Bitcoin with a larger block rewards. If you're going to generate a block with a larger block reward, it won't be accepted by the nodes running this current version of Bitcoin and thus both chain inevitably deviates.

If Ver can call it Bitcoin then why not OP 😜

Anything forked from Bitcoin is not Bitcoin anymore, it's altcoin but people like Ver thinks that become bitcoin and Bitcoin becomes Bitcoin core.

@NatureMoves, supply or anything can be manipulated but that will be your own coin. It's the piece of code you change and fork Bitcoin.

is it some kind of block manipulation by duplicating each node in use and then moving it on the blockchain data. if to decode each individual it depends on how the system can read from block to block. as WBTC refers to blockchain with the same system, then the price is almost the same, but I have always known that China wants to carry out this manipulation, so that it is no longer continued until now. long ago China had said that they wanted to increase the supply of bitcoin.

If you want to make any change in the Bitcoin then you should propose BIP to the the core miners are responsible for any change in the network.If they found it useful and efficient the changes would be added in the Bitcoin code on the GitHub which is open source.You cannot make changes by cracking code of your own as network concesus is required with more than 50% vote of all the participants of the network like full nodes.The main control is Blockstream who make any final changes to the Bitcoin code  on GitHub as they have included many implementation suggested through BIP which is Bitcoin Improvement Protocol.So it's just that way.

Bitcoin has only one network. Even if you fake it it will still be different. Maybe you can cheat with fake bitcoins but that won't be believed. you are the only owner of the coin.

If there's someone who will be broke the code protocol of Bitcoin, it might change the fundamental principle of what Bitcoin had.
Like:

• Pseudonymous
• Irreversible Transactions
• Open-Source
• Decentralization
• No censorship
• Max supply 21 Million

However, it's theoretically that it could be changed as what said most above but there's a consensus, through hard fork everything will change that should be adopted by the co-developers, users, and the miners the new Bitcoin code.  We have now so many Bitcoin forked coins with infinite supply, since Bitcoin is open source and you can modify the code, they can create new coins and copy cat from Bitcoin code but it now a different name.

Interesting...so all I need is to be good in sales & marketing this "new" Bitcoin and I'm good to go?  ;D Ok I suck at that...I can't even persuade my husband to not mow the lawn lol

Bitcoin supply have final and there are not any developer have bitcoin on their supply because the creator of bitcoin was gone, I think if altcoin could be manipulated supply but can't for bitcoin, how ever many people loss their bitcoin assets because private key have gone and make bitcoin supply more increase little.

This is completely wrong. The set of consensus rules is not manipulated by the majority. When you're running a node, you're obeying these rules in order for your node to be considered as a "Bitcoin Node". A change in the consensus rules means that you're not obeying, which also means that you're not following the bitcoin blockchain. These rules were set by Satoshi and they can't change just because the majority says so.

In other words, if the majority of nodes decide to change one of these rules, they instantly stop being the majority.

Wouldn't that only be fruitful when all the computers and all the offline Bitcoins , what theu do is update this code and after the price fluctuations ofcourse no one will , you will be taken to jail and honestly it's not easy and people did say. It is possible ofcourse, but not easy.

If you do want to earn then you should rather use this skills for something else.


That's not something that will work , we will see a sudden crash in the market which will cause economic unrest. The price will die down and we all know what will happen.

There is very straight forward answer to this question and that is no one can alter bitcoin blockchain code and therefore supply of coins can't be altered. This is why bitcoin despite so many odds is still popular among thousands of coins.

The maximum supply cannot be increased or decreased even by the Satoshi who created bitcoin, so no one can crack anything and if they do their node will be isolated from other nodes so there will be no change in the actual bitcoin blockchain network. While trading volumes are highly manipulated by the most f the exchange by wash trading.

Bitcoin is what it's today because of its transparency and the blockchain tech that has come to stay. The day its total supply is manipulated to add more, that will be the death of Bitcoin and that's why any success at this is called a fork. That way people don't get to see that it's Bitcoin that's manipulated but rather that a fork has occurred from Bitcoin. I think if there's any manipulation that can be done in this guise, that should be on Dogecoin. We need that infinite supply of Doge to be capped to a number.

You need to be Roger Ver with learn amount of bitcoin in your possession and then fork bitcoin.

Being serious, you can create as many coins as you want but unless the community realize the value or see any value in your coin then your coins are useless.

If you ask this question to any bitcoiner they will say it's completely impossible to increase or change the total supply but theoretically it's possible bitcoin is using blockchain technology and according to the protocols, if 51% of the nodes agree with the changing of the total supply, this will be changes but one big reason of why people like bitcoin is to having the limited and unchangeable total supply. So, changing the total supply will have negative effect on it and that's why the nodes will never accept such thing.

If 51% of the nodes agree with the changing of the total supply, then guess what: They are not bitcoin nodes anymore! Bitcoin consensus rules aren't decided by the majority. It's not a one-node one-vote-for-the-consensus-rules. You're probably confusing consensus with the 51% attack (https://learnmeabitcoin.com/technical/51-attack).

I think Bitcoin will be held with a volume of 21 million. This number is given by Satoshi from the original Bitcoin version. Despite going through many forks and many different types of Bitcoin such as BCH, BSV, BTCD ... but Bitcoin was originally the chain with the highest value and most trusted by everyone. The above shows the power of people's trust in Bitcoin. I think that if Bitcoin were to interfere with more than 21 million it would make the value of Bitcoin drop rapidly and people would leave Bitcoin.

The 21 million supply for bitcoin is fixed and there's nothing anyone can do to change that, meaning nobody can manipulate the supply, maybe the one who can truly say if this is possible or not is the creator of bitcoin (Satoshi), and too bad he's been cut out from the rest of the world for a very long time now, one thing I know is that if this could actually happen, then it will alter everything we all believed about bitcoin.

Is it possible to change the code and add more coins? Yes, will it ever be done? No, bitcoin is now a one trillion dollar project and the developers are never going to do anything that could risk bitcoin in that way, this is why updates are kind of slow as they want to make absolutely sure that everything is OK before they apply an update and the same is true for the supply of bitcoin.

The decision to cap the supply made by satoshi at the beginning of the project is probably the most important one that has nothing to do with innovation, he created an asset that is scarce and that as demand grows its price will grow with it, getting rid of that or increasing the supply will crash the market overnight and no one wants that.

Yes, possible but we are running on different nodes which not under by bitcoin protocol, nothing can change the bitcoin code, if there are changes, that is not a bitcoin network. There are too many developers trying to copy the code of bitcoin and make their own coin, but it is totally different from bitcoin.

The fact is the fact, nobody can change the fixed amount of bitcoin and if we are talking about manipulating, yes bitcoin price can be manipulated but does that mean they can change the fixed amount of bitcoin.

Yes, anyone can change the 21 million cap or the protocols. But if most of the "people" don't support what you have done, all you would be doing is creating a fork and a new coin. The coin with new cap won't replace the existing chain due to less support. So yeah anyone can do that but will need support from majority of the people (miners).
On other hand, the currently circulated bitcoins supply can be manipulated by whales. All whales together can buy most of the supply creating an artificial shortage and increasing the demand.

There can be mined only 21 million of BTC and mathematics won’t let to mine more. The structure of BTC Blockchain is designed in such way that miners get reward from each block by formula based on the law of inverse geometric progression. To change this amount of 21 million BTC need to be changed the source code that is well protected.

This topic about Bitcoin or cryptocurrency manipulation is a speculation for a long time already. Bitcoin can't be manipulated just because someone's not selling his large amount of Bitcoin, because of the supply and demand, if you know what I mean. When there's a limited supply, meaning the price would increase, but not totally true in Bitcoin. Just like what the others already said in the first page, you'll need everyone to cooperate with you to sell Bitcoin in a low price for it to be manipulated, just for temporary.

However, many says that only influence or news affects the price chart movement of Bitcoin. For example is if a certain country would ban it or accept it as a currency, something like that.

Satoshi Nakamoto the founder of bitcoin didn't created bitcoin to be manipulate in supply than to eliminate any wrong transaction  that will cause people pain and regret at the end of their transaction.

It is called bitcoin fork, and yes everyone can manipulate the supply of bitcoin, just copy the code and create your own bitcoin and if you believe enough that there is a value in that coin then you might be onto something but even if you can copy the code of bitcoin, that doesn't mean that is part of the original supply because you are basically creating your own coin and not bitcoin.

the old question and the answer remain the same, that is, it never will...
Bitcoin supply has been fixed and will not be able to increase, this is the reason why there are many fork coins that are useful to maintain price stability. cryptography is something that cannot be changed again when it makes cmiiw.

Even if things like total supply and block size could be changed like some forks did in history, it would need majority of nodes to accept those changes and it would again result in some new fork.
There is also an option of some new bug to be found in future that could be exploited but chances for that are minimal because Bitcoin has been battle tested in real life for many years and code is checked all the time by many developers.

Do you mean it's not here then?: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin (hush, hush, ...)

Actually, this post is quite interesting, and points to the reasons why the actual maximum amount of generated bitcoins a wee bit under the 21M figure: Why is the final Bitcoin amount less than 21 million BTC? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1482674.msg14942633#msg14942633)

After reading the above post, it’s pretty clear that remembering 21M is easier than going into details about why the real effective max. generated bitcoin figure is really going to be slightly shy of 21M …

Yes, it is very possible to increase the supply of the bitcoin or make it more or even make it infinite but the thing is that it is very hard to crack the code because you will also do the re-arranging of the blocks which is even the smartest people can't do that thing. So if you are asking if it is really possible to increase the supply then probably the answer would be "Yes" but it is kind of a hard job to that thing. Just think why the government didn't print so much paper money? it is because there is only fix money that we need to be circulated.

You really do not need to crack anything if you want to increase the number of coins in bitcoin, all you need is a consensus between all the parties involved but the fact remains that there is no need for the increase in the number of coins and if the developers does anything then it will affect the entire market.

When you are talking about government printing money, it was done and there are countries struggling with inflation because the government printed too much money and flooded the market.

In theory it is possible to manipulate the Bitcoin supply, but in practice it is very difficult to do. Even the percentage of success is very small,
the proof is that until now it has been more than 11 years that no one has succeeded in manipulating the Bitcoin supply. I think Bitcoin will still
have a supply of 21 million, as determined by Satoshi Nakamoto. And we don't need to worry about the total Bitcoin supply being manipulated,
because I believe it will never happen.

Interesting indeed, thank you for bring this up.. but I guess the Bitcoin final figure will be far less than the 21M. One estimate suggested there could be 20% of all Bitcoins is lost or simply unrecoverable.

Keeping this in mind that would leave us just ~16.8M bitcoins only.

But of course we don’t need to worry because we have satoshi after all....
1BTC = 100,000,000 satoshi

And how many satoshis we have :)

1,680,000,000,000,000 = one quadrillion six hundred eighty trillion

That’s enough for the whole world, remember as of 2021 there’s approximately US $37 trillion in circulation.

It is a few lines of code if you want to edit the number of coins in existence you can do so if you have control over the keys and there is no need for the increase in supply and no one will be willing to abide by that if anyone proposes to increase the number of coins. Since this runs through consensus there is nothing to worry and no one is going to manipulate anything.

In fact, I think someone has thought about it before you even much earlier, it could be a few days, months or the previous year, but things like this, of course, the developer has prepared and anticipated from the start. of course the developer also does not want to experience this kind of thing so that they get a loss.
but it does not rule out the theoretical possibility that this could happen and could just be done but what after impact? surely they do something, of course, think about the impact first

it is more than a few lines of code because the maximum supply is not hard coded in bitcoin's code. the way supply works is based on mathematics where the first block had a 50 bitcoin reward and it halves every 2016 blocks. so the supply also involves the POW and difficulty adjustment. that is why the newbie altcoin forkers always have problem making changes to bitcoin core when they make a copy of it.

Supply is know to all how can it be manipulated again! That is no longer possible except that will mean that Satoshi Nakamoto has come back to temper with the Supply, I don't think any other devs can do anything with the Supply,
Bitcoin total supply will always remain 21 million and nothing more.

Precisely, if competent enough the closest you can get is to create a fork and hope other people will see value in that newly created fork and use those coins to derive value from but since this is a commonly known idea among the crypto geeks and community in general nobody is going to fall for that. At least not enough people for the fork to become mainstream.

So, you need not to worry about BTC having an increased supply than its cap already!

No, even Satoshi has no power to tamper the supply of Bitcoin.  It is all about the consensus of miners.  Satoshi had been long gone on the scene and even if he come back,  I don't think he has that great influence to affect miners into agreeing to anything he wanted to do with Bitcoin development.  And if he do, he will more likely create a Bitcoin fork and that is not Bitcoin itself.

it will not be easy to manipulate the bitcoin supply, even though you have mastered the block chain or blockchain method it is unlikely that it will easily materialize in the public market, because surely your manipulation will be rejected by the public.

Hello everybody. Even if I am not very well versed in this matter, but the total amount of bitcoins determined at the time of creation is constant and cannot be changed, which is tantamount to trying to change the speed of light. It is a constant, not subject to change. It is better to spend more time looking for opportunities to buy more bitcoins than looking for opportunities where there are none.

“BTC is not a capital asset: it does not produce cash flows resulting from economic returns on capital.” ... The currency's meteoric rise could be motivated by more than frenzied demand: Pickard indicated the price of bitcoin could be “artificially manipulated” by Tether and possibly other stablecoins

You can not with Bitcoin total supply that is fixed with the Protocol.

You can with sourced code of Bitcoin. Amazingly, you can find hundreds of clone coins from Bitcoin sourced code. They claim they are forks of Bitcoin but I consider them as clones, not forks. Many of them have nothing to do with mission from their fork. They use available sourced code and modify it for their interests.

• How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!! (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5221882.0)
• Bitcoin Fork List (https://www.bitcoinforks.io/)

I don't think that we can manipulate to increase the supply but if it it counts, I think that purposely losing your bitcoin to lower the supply is technically some form of supply manipulation although it aims to decrease the bitcoins supply though.

No need to crack the code of bitcoin.

Govs or other big bad asses just need to brainwash the majority of bitcoin users to make them believe paper bitcoin they issue=bitcoin.

How many people will realise bitcoin on paypal or any software you think of is not bitcoin at all but bitcoin IOU instead.

When the majority of users can't distinguish this, the supply could be manipulated.

Yeah, you could shout out bitcoin IOU supply is not bitcoin supply but who cares?

This is exactly the same trick that has been screwing gold since many decades ago.

What is this and How will government do such? Paper Bitcoin?

Sorry where did you get this idea? Some good explanation and proof?
Here we go again , manipulation issue.
You have a wild imagination mate , why not use that to create a Book ?  ;D

Indeed, replenishing the supply is quite difficult for a particular project like bitcoin, which means drastically reducing the value and scarcity of the product, those who possess this opportunity to manipulate certainly will not do such a bad thing but perhaps unlocking this problem is not that simple when bitcoin has been an irreversible chain for many years

Theoretically, it is possible but It will take a hard fork to make this possible. Changing the total supply is not possible unless all miners and payment providers jointly upgrade their current Bitcoin system. This is not possible if the miner and the user do not agree to use the modified Bitcoin Code together. Current Bitcoin's block size is over ~330GB, which makes it even more difficult to change the core blockchain system. So technically it is harder than hard to modify the core system or manipulate the Bitcoin system. Every Hodlers and investors/miner will refuse to accept the newly modified code, everyone will try their best to keep alive the current version cause already they have invested in it.

Supply can be manipulated if the core team, miners and users are accept the changed version of the Bitcoin system, If the majority percent are willing to adopt the modified version then it will be possible but I don't think the economic majority will agree to accept any changes cause Already they have invested a lot of money and holding a worthy part of Bitcoin and any changes will devaluate the holdings of current investors and miners. So, there is nothing to be worried about until the economic majority provides their supports.

I think the bitcoin architecture has many layers. and to modify the structure of the addition the code will affect many relevant metrics and block, hash frequency, bitcoin having ,, .. I think no one will be able to access and supplement the supply of bitcoin. Except, Satoshi could step up. Lol

Anything can happen.  That really isn't a question.  I think the question you should be asking is what scenarios could present themselves that would cause the development team to pursue a change in Bitcoin's supply.   Personally, I think it would be the end of Bitcoin if this happened, so it's rather unlikely, but things do happen.  Maybe the government would make the Core team an offer they couldn't refuse.  Maybe more nefarious activities from more scrupulous individuals could even be at play.  I don't think the community would stand for it though, and ultimately they would need massive support to make something like this happen, which is why I say it is extremely unlikely.

I thought for such substantial changes you need more than fifty percent. You don't fly need most of the miners but also all exchanges to upgrade the wallets. I on't know precisely how it works but I remember Andreas Antonopoulos said that in order for the supply to be changed you need more than just a lion share of the hash power.