Bitcoin Forum

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If you were to modify your Bitcoin Core with a different block interval, different block rewards or halving, you'll effectively change the total possible coins generated. This would only apply for those that is running the client with the same modification as you. So no, anyone can change the limit but it won't be followed. It is already happening with the altcoins that are forked from Bitcoin. The consensus that you've mentioned effectively means that those who runs that modification consider theirs as 'Bitcoin'.

As with the limit of 21 million, it'll probably not be called Bitcoin because there really isn't any real reason for it to be changed. The original Bitcoin should still have 21 million as its limit.

if the consensus is considered as one of the benchmarks to support the 21 million Bitcoin numbers, then how can we clearly describe it that until now no one has tried to do this?
Whether with the amount of 21 million or not, bitcoin is beyond the control of any party, except for China, which seems to have the capacity to try to change the consensus system and make reforms. but in essence if the 21 million amount can be manipulated, then would you please give us a scheme to use?

One of Bitcoin's main strengths is it's historically unchanged and predictable supply schedule, as well as the max supply cap. You do realize though that changing the max supply totally invalidates this core characteristic, right? Not a single Bitcoiner in the right mind would support such change.

Yes and no. A bitcoin node sends and receives information, but most importantly verifies. Note that each one runs autonomously. By that you understand that no one forces none to change a consensus rule, like the 21,000,000 coins. The already existent nodes define that Bitcoin works that way, since January of 2009. Every bitcoin node follows the rules chosen by satoshi. Everyone is free to change the consensus rules and continue/restart the blockchain, but that wouldn't be Bitcoin's. It would be a hard fork, a chain with different rules.

To answer you, if the majority of the nodes decide to follow different rules, they immediately stop being the majority. But since it's a majority of users (which means that they're a lot), they can manipulate people that their Bitcoin is Bitcoin.

What does China have to do with the consensus rules of Bitcoin? The capacity has nothing to do with the consensus, not to mention that China isn't a single entity to perform 51% attack if we assume that they have enough computational power in total.

It is not. Your full node should have the code that enforces the specific parameters pertaining to Bitcoin's rules. You can verify that you are infact enforcing the 21 million rule by checking the rewards halving, difficulty re targeting and block rewards within the code.

It is easy to change the parameters, whether anyone wants to follow your fork is an entirely different issue.
They don't. Seems absurd that you think Bitcoin is within a control of any single entity and is still surviving at this point.

Cloud mining is the best way to lose money, don't fool people with false promises because you won't do well on this forum - we know it is 100% SCAM.

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Everything is subject to change, but as others have commented, anything that would interfere with the basic features would actually be the creation of a new coin - and the original Bitcoin should just stay at its max supply, so Satoshi determined, and it should be respected. If you want to see what happens to alternative BTC that have a max supply of tens of billions best to take a look at all the BTC forks -> https://forkdrop.io/list-of-bitcoin-forks

No matter what, the original will always be what people follow the most - it is the only decentralized solution in the literal sense of the word - all other crypto projects have someone who manages them in their own interest.

It is actually a modifiable feature of Bitcoin. If somebody has his/her own fork from Bitcoin, he/she can change it to a value whatever he/she likes. But the most important part here is whether the people will want to use that version of Bitcoin or not. So I don't expect that kind of a change happen in the future.

The miners that have accumulated a lot of Bitcoin, while the whales that only wish Bitcoin price to be increasing, are they the one that will agree for a change in the total supply of Bitcoin to surpass 21 million, I think that is just not going to happen. I believe this is the last thing that can happen to bitcoin, even to be the last thing seem more of an understatement because the chance for such to happen is not realistic. Not realistic because people do not want their Bitcoin to have lesser value, people want it to appreciate, while increasing the total supply will reduce its value in term of price, and this, miners and holders will not want.

21 million supply of bitcoin won't change forever. It's there to stay and can't be modified. As said explained well by ranochigo, there has been a lot of "upgrades" made by those fork coins and have replaced the supply limit into lower or higher one dependent from their stand towards the upgrade that they want.
But at the end, they're not bitcoin but only became forked coins or mere altcoins.

Bro I can't comprehend enough on what you pertain on this matter. You just agreed to ranochigo and put a a simple comment that doesn't really makes sense. The modification on Bitcoin Core said by ranochigo only says that it could only apply on one's node. And with millions of users that runs their own nodes, it would even be impossible to change all of those node's limits. And no, it wasn't fork coins nor altcoins you misunderstood about. It is still on Bitcoin, but on its backend.

Bitcoin's limit is indeed unchangeable. Yet as soon as there would be forking to happen, it would also pullback the chance of Bitcoin being reach it's limit sooner. Hence, 21 million limit can happen decades from now, as it would be hard for miners to gain BTC with more forks to come, resulting to supply being circulated slowly in the market.

Even if it's up to the supermajority to decide whether to raise the max supply cap or not, I still don't think they will ever try to, given how crucial it is for bitcoin's valuation.

Bitcoin's value and appeal to the masses banks on the fact that it has limited supply and availability. If that limit is to be changed due to a consensus ruling, everyone holding bitcoins would be affected. It's just a lose-lose situation, and does not bring about any change since devs can just implement further divisibility to address the supply scarcity.

People can still create their own version of bitcoin with 21M+ coins. Though I can say, with utmost certainty, that almost everyone will agree that the 21 million max supply cap is, for most cases, still sufficient.

The mathematical limit is in the code. And that limit is the result of the halving. Maybe a consensus could bring more coins, but the block reward should change and the having times should do it too. Is a complex task.

I think it would be easier to add more zeros after the point than adding more coins to the blockchain, and both would have the same effect.

On point and these are the characteristics on why bitcoin had been supported that much by the masses because of those qualities which numbers could really be changed or simply its already been fixed.
21 supply is still an issue? Even adoption would go into that global scale, come to think that 1btc is 100 million satoshis and even if we do have that global scale of acceptance or usage
then those supply that is circulating would really be enough to accumulate the population and of course excluding those lost bitcoins in the void wouldnt really join up the circulation.
Limit? better not to stress out yourself on thinking with this.

I feel like it's good that it can be changed. It allows us to improve security in case bitcoin was to still be a big thing 20 years from now.

If Bitcoin ever became a reserve currency we might need to add some improvements and even do something about lost coins, because if you think that we could be down about 20% of total supply due to lost wallets and passwords, in the next 20 years it could be 50%. The consensus voting will allow us to deal with this problem in future.

It's not like people are going to vote to make bitcoin worse or weaker in any way. Voters will have a stake in it and will want it to be better and stronger so if we ever vote to increase the total supply cap there will be a strong reason behind it.

If someone wants to make an altcoins, it would take more than modifying the block generation parameters. Implementing a new magic bytes and dns seeds or nodes would be necessary as well for them to be connected to each other.

If you're able to modify a client that way and people actually use it, that is how BCH is spawned (albeit with quite some modification).

The whole narrative of this almost wants to suggest that when the 21 million mining limit is reached, like it will be impossible to get btc. However, that is not the case. At 21 Million limit, people will still be able to procure btc from people who own them at that point. So extending the 21 million limit is not really necessary.

Everyone who looks at Bitcoin and everywhere he looks is written only 21 million coins, more than that nobody knows and is written, there are three opinions what I think at the moment, it could be more, it could be less than 21 million or it could be 21 coins.

I haven't seen your questions or doubts about 21 Bitcoin, which is circulating in the market right now and didn't find out about it, 21 million Bitcoin is normal thinking right now.

21 or so doesn't know yet, however, if I find one, I'll let you know here.

Not exactly. 21 million cap is guaranteed by math (like most other things in bitcoin). It is a combination of the starting block reward and reward halvings that ensures there will never be any more than 21 million bitcoins created.

Yes, like every other consensus rule in bitcoin.

Yes, a hard fork has to take place to change the block rewards to allow more or less coins to be generated. But it won't happen because there is no valid reason to change the cap.

Yes, but only if there is a valid reason for doing so. You can't just change stuff for no reason.

There IS a mathematical limit as I explained above.
There is also another limit in form of the amount field in transaction outputs which can only be a 64-bit integer.

21 million is the total supply of bitcoin that most people read but per protocol, there is not exactly 21 million bitcoins. The total supply is a little bit less than 21 million bitcoins, in decimal figure.

Many scam developers use source code of bitcoin and make their altcoins. They self-called as forks from bitcoin but in fact they are altcoins. They give people promise that their shit coins will be another bitcoin but forget it please.

There are enough bitcoin for people on the planet to buy it. It is only a matter on your side, buy it or not. If buy it, buy it soon or late.

Lastly please read the quote that is satoshi's explanation

The way I understood it, and based on a lot of informative responses above, is that Bitcoin is hard-coded in such a way that tampering with the original code wouldn't change anything but would merely create another one, which is of course different from the original one.

Who knows, in the near future, the fork might appeal more to the huge majority of the population and would become the main currency? But it doesn't mean that Bitcoin was successfully changed from its original design.

So, as to your concern, Bitcoin is indeed ruled by no other but mathematics. You change the math, you are creating another one; you're not effecting any change to that which you supposed to change.

Will satoshi lie to the users that bitcoin has a 21 million limit? I don't think so because that was what satoshi wanted. And those bitcoins that you say is going to be generated outside the 21 million is bitcoin fork which only has a value because you have a lot of followers that believes that it has a value. If you think that changing bitcoin is as easy having a consensus then it should have changed a long time ago, not to mention that it will be difficult for every user to agree on something because we form our own opinions and some of them will disagree.

There is no way to change it. It was set to 21million and that's gonna stay until the end. Unless Satoshi somehow become active and decided to do some redomination and changes on the tokenomics. But as you can see on the previous discussion there is a reason why there are only 21million coin of bitcoin and this number signifies factor and not just Satoshi favorite number.

This topic does seem to be getting posted an unusually number of numerous times.  By some newbies.  I suspect there is an ulterior motive to spread fud. 

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5320980.msg56469193#msg56469193

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5322436.msg56517591#msg56517591

They may think that if they can interject a conversation about somehow changing bitcoin's hard limit, they would have succeeded in killing off bitcoin, or at least trying to kill off bitcoin.

But as you point out mk4, no bitcoiner would do anything to reduce the value of what they are holding.  So this exercise is folly.

Anyone can change the codes because now everyone can learn about the blockchain and build their own. But it cannot be the original bitcoin that is what the blockchain and decentralization is about so yeah God is unique.

^ Yes, you are right that they can modify the code because that is open source code but no way that they can change it. If that will happen, it will change everything and should accept by everyone. BTC code should not change because it will create a conflict to the network that against by the users and the miners of BTC, if that will change, it will change everything. That is why we have different forked coins to BTC, they created a network that similar to BTC but actually not the same when we talked decentalization.

You could possibly propose any change through BIP and if the majority of the network accepts it considering it is beneficial for Bitcoin network,they will.make changes in the code on GitHub.But the miners will never make the 21 million limit to increase because it's the main algorithm setup by Sathoshi.If they had to increase the limit they need to make changes in overall mining algorithms and block intervals.The other reasons is that the prices are increasing due to limited supply of 21 million and miners will not be willing to decrease their profit shares in the long run as increase in supply will lead to price falls.The bugs in Bitcoin had been removed but no huge changes are made in the open source code for Bitcoin.The 51% miners will need to accept the proposal which is impossible in this case.

Whatever the majority of the network says doesn't matter at all. BIP is used to propose changes with detailed technical outlines and gives the opportunity for others to critique and refine the proposal as well. That is why you have various stages of drafting, finalizing, etc. The code merges are not limited by the people that opposes it, if so then Segwit would have never been included at all. Miners showed little support and there was an obvious rift that formed in the process.
Miners do not need to adopt the changes. If the nodes want to enforce the rules, the miners either follow or just continue mining on their own fork without the included change. That being said, it is not that miners are not important but they're far from the main stakeholders in issues like this where the community would be affected as well. Mining algorithm will not change, block intervals need not change either.

AFAIK bitcoin blockchain is designed in a way that there will be maximum 21 million bitcoin that will be generated ever and last bitcoin will be mined in 2140. Nobody can alter this supply of bitcoin, even satoshi himself can't do that.