Bitcoin Forum

Global population growth is about 1% every year.

A fixed total supply means the currency is deflationary, after accounting for population growth and lost coins. Could this system potentially over-incentivise saving?

Would it be better to have a fixed supply increase of 1% every year instead? Under this system, it would be only mildly deflationary due to lost coins. This means that in the long term, $1 today would still be worth more slightly more than $1 in the future (a "reward" for delaying gratification and still satisfying positive time preference). I know 1% pa is probably not much in the scheme of things, but wouldn't this be a more neutral choice which doesn't over-incentive saving nor over-incentivise investment?

The tricky thing with questions like this is that some people will like the idea, while others won't.  In order to implement the idea, it would involve a hard fork.  Many would opt to stay on the original chain.  In effect, you end up creating a weaker chain with fewer users than you would have if you just left things alone.  Yet another forkcoin like BCH/BSV/BTG/etc.  It doesn't really get you anywhere.  Sticking with the status quo will generally result in a stronger network.

Whether an idea has merit or not isn't sufficient justification in my view.  Upgrades have to be regarded as necessary if they are to be successfully implemented via hard fork.  

Personally, I would prefer to look at increasing the number of decimal places, allowing for greater divisibility.  Increasing overall supply above 21 million is a red line for me.

Why do you think a fixed supply cap is better?

I understand the "move slow, don't break things" mentality that surrounds Bitcoin developers, but I don't understand the resistence to change. If there is something small that can be improved why not just do it. An example is certain parts of the code erroneously require certain fields to be in "reverse byte order" while other fields don't. This was clearly a coding error from Satoshi. Why not just change it?

Credibility isn't to be underestimated.  If we start breaking guarantees that were made at the start, where do we draw the line?  A few vital fundamentals need to remain set in stone for Bitcoin to be credible.  No one will take it seriously if we set a precedent that we can just move the goalposts whenever and that certainty isn't assured.

AFAIK, current popularity and sky high price of bitcoin is because of its fixed supply of 21 million coins. There are successful hard forks of BTC but none even came closer to break the popularity of BTC. BTC despite all odds still has confidence of its community. After every halving we see change in BTC price, which clearly tells that this controlled inflation has worth.

Because with a fixed supply cap, we don't have to worry about the price of the coin going down, with a limited supply and close to infinite demand, we will see a high price for each of the coins in the supply because it's limited and it's getting scarce each day. An increase in supply cap is going to make the prices go down since there's a lot for many to go around.

Because I reject the notion that removing the fixed limit is either "something small" or an "improvement".

Bitcoin is well known for having a fixed supply. Even people who know little else about bitcoin, know it has a fixed supply. Removing the fixed supply and moving to an inflationary model is not something small, but rather is changing one of the fundamentals of bitcoin; a fundamental that many people based their decision to buy bitcoin on. The uproar would be massive. I can just see all the low quality clickbait headlines now about how there are now potentially "infinite bitcoin" and therefore it is guaranteed to be worthless in the future. If we can change something so fundamental to bitcoin, something that Satoshi himself set, then what stops us changing anything else? What stops us making it 10% a year, or 100% a year?

As DooMAD has said, if you need "more" coins, then you can simply divide them in to small denominations. Changing the fixed supply is fundamentally changing bitcoin.

On practice it's irrelevant to the world, because Bitcoin has so little users that you can't observe its macroeconomic effects. With the current level of adoption it would take hundreds of years until Bitcoin will start having some wait, and not only because so little people use Bitcoin (estimated 30-50 million right now), but also because these users mostly just bought it and hodl without using it as a payment method.

The thing we will be worrying about in 20-30 years is if transaction fees will be enough to guarantee enough security against 51% attacks. If not, then that could be an incentive to adopt uncapped supply and block rewards, but it's still too early to theorize about it.

A fixed supply cap only assumes that there should be a set amount of money within circulation, the bad thing about this set up is, money lost within the circulation would still incur value and since rendered unusable, the central bank must make up for the lost banknote by creating another of that denomination. Thing is this will negatively affect the value of the currency, which in turn could cause inflation due to overprinting of money. On the other hand, having a total fixed supply ensures that no money can be made after all have been released into the public, keeping its value and importance intact, and even if some of the money gets lost in circulation, knowing that there's no way to create more money means that the coin's value stays relatively the same, at the expense of less hands who can get to use the money which is not that good either. Bitcoin may not be able to make up for the additional humans who would have to use the currency as he/she grows up. This could result to people resorting to a much more abundant currency to accomodate their purchases. This is one downside of a deflationary currency like bitcoin, it only ensure the value of the coin, never the amount of people who can use it.

maybe certain people dont understand fixed supply..(two other network fans suggesting dividing bitcoin(facepalm))

when someone says increase the decimals. they are actually advocating to increase the supply.
when these people learns about sharable units(doubt they know) and understand increasing sharable units=increasing the supply they might learn that whether its increasing it at the top or bottom is the same thing.

the unit btc. is not existent in the blockchain, nor raw tx data..
its just a multiplication for human easy reading.
the actual rule of supply is at the lowest unit of measure. not the basket/box term of convenient math multiplication

at code level there is only one unit of measure.. (sat)
and since 2009 it had 5000000000 units every block produced which halved every 210,000 blocks
that is the real scarcity rule..

by increasing the units per block is increasing the supply
it does not matter if you call this new supply
6.25000000000 btc
or 625000000000 msat
at user graphic interface level..

at the code level its the same amount of sharable units being created per block
(1000x more than current)
..
lets stick with the scarcity rule
625000000 halving in a couple years.. not becoming:
625000000000(1000x less scarce)

the only reason a certain few people in this topic is advocating for an 'increase in the decimals' is because they are a fan of another network created less than 6 years ago that uses 11 decimal tokens and they want bitcoin to become more compatible to this other network.
destroying bitcoins scarcity code (units of measure limit) purely to pump the ideology that people should use this other network instead.


in short. no one should change the units of measure of bitcoin..
if you want a different measure go play with another network and leave bitcoin alone

How about because you don't need to.
There are tons of alt-coins out there with different options and coin amounts and features.

But think about this as of now BTC is #1 in market cap.
Adding the market cap of #s 2 through 20 you still don't get to the BTC market cap.

So keeping it the way it is really seems to work better then mucking about. You want more coins / more decimals / something else go to the altcoin section.

-Dave

The truth is no one probably knows. Cryptos in general are a totally new concept to economist and there is no way to prove those theory correct or wrong. What you've suggested is essentially a tail emission model, where there is a steady monetary inflation rate after a period of time. This ensures stability by providing miners with a stable block rewards, and isn't like Bitcoin where miners have to rely on the fees.

Bitcoin as a currency is very different from fiat, where financial institutions are able to introduce measures to manipulate the economy.

Most of the responses in this thread seem to boil down to "that's how it was from the start, so that's how it should be". I'm keen to understand why it was like this from the start. Did Satoshi (and other developers) not consider the impacts of lost coins and population growth? Did they feel that we should incentivise saving more than investment? Did they feel that the fixed 21m approach doesn't in fact incentivise saving more than investment? Has there been any meaningful discussion by the developers about the implications of the various options apart from "this is just the way it is"?

Someone said: "Although the supply of Bitcoin is constant, the population is growing. As more and more people start to join the buying ranks, the rigid money supply will lead to deflationary pressure."

This is the wrong idea of ​​not understanding the status quo. With the continuous improvement of the level of social and economic development and the level of education, the aging of the population will become more and more serious, which is caused by the decline in population growth. At present, some regions, especially developed countries, have seen negative population growth. In fact, our second-child policy was proposed in response to the slowdown in population growth. With the increase in the degree of industrialization in areas with the highest level of population growth (poor or underdeveloped), this downward pressure will continue.

Yes, there's a merit to a fixed supply. It makes the crypto or the item that you're talking about much more expensive as time goes by and the demand goes up, not to mention that some will get lost thus causing it to go up much more in the process.

We each have a banana. We each cut our banana in to 10 pieces. I then cut each of those pieces in half, giving me 20 pieces. You buy a second banana and cut it in to 10 pieces too, giving you 20 pieces as well. I keep cutting my banana in to smaller and smaller pieces, whereas you keep buying more bananas. Only I have the same amount of banana as we started with, whereas you have increased the total amount of bananas.

Subdividing 21 million bitcoin in to smaller pieces is not the same as raising the cap of 21 million bitcoin, regardless of what units you are considering.

Sure. Here are some quotes from Satoshi regarding lost coins and population growth:

It's quite an interesting discussion, I must say! 1% increase in fixed supply every year may not sound huge but it will bring the inflation game into bitcoin! It wouldn't hurt the price growth of bitcoin because it entirely depends on the granular level adoption that creates demand which in turn drives the price growth.

For me, it's a good idea. Instead of having a fixed cap, it makes sense to increase the cap by 1% each year. But the current halving pattern must stay as it is to compensate the inflationary nature of fixed percentage increase. It's interesting to see what others are thinking about this proposal.

bitcoin code does not grow banana's that are then split.....
bitcoin code grows pieces/cells that are then for human linguistics is refered to as a banana when grouped together in a certain allotment(100,000,000 cells)

if i told you that fruit grow biologically cell by cell and a "banana" is defined as 100,000,000 cells.
and you wanted to Genetically modify it so that a "banana" has 100billion cells instead of a 100million

you would spend years stamping your foot "its still a banana" while everyone else is saying no its a GM banana that traditional banana's would be split by your measure into 20 slices of 0.3inch³
where as the new GM banana can be sliced into 20,000 slices of 0.3inch³
meaning 20,000 people can get to taste banana which broke the hard rule even at your human expression. where only 20 people could have a 0.3inch³ slice

.
having a GM banana with more slice capacity. at your human expression level(facepalm)
or having 1000x more cells at DNA code level but you trying to call it a normal banana(facepalm)..
both result as the same thing..

they both allow more people to have a taste. meaning less scarce

..
oh and remember your block reward halving understanding.. where the halving is not btc halved.. but one less binary bit from the smallest unit measure thats actually programmed into the code..!!!

yep even you previously knew(but pretend to forget) that its not a banana sliced. but instead cells combined and human expressed as a 'banana'
where every 4 years the dna of cells is programmed to create half as many cells as previous. growing less per season

you know.. the:
5,000,000,000sat(50btc)
=100101010000001011111001000000000
and to half the reward you just remove the last bit
=10010101000000101111100100000000

well you want to break that hard limit DNA from 2009 and turn
100101010000001011111001000000  ( you refer to it as 8decimal 6.25btc)
into
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000 (11 decimal 6.25btc)

pretending your GMO banana that is 1000x bigger is the same sharable scarcity of slices as a traditional banana is very mis-informing..
giving out 20,000 0.3inch³ slices of a 60inch tall by 10 inch thick GMO banana.
pretending its as rare as giving out twenty 0.3inch³ of a 6inch³ traditional banana
is very very mis-informing and not even factually or practically or biologically or logically correct


you seem to have forgotton the rule of remove one binary bit every 210,000 blocks. hard rule supply limit
and you want to change it to add several binary bits

do you really want to act naive about the concept of the binary limit being broke just to pretend the human linguistics is the same. even though there are more sharable units and what is created is not the same natural rules of what what was the hard DNA code of bitcoin

Fixed supply is by far the superior choice because it can be set in stone and everything will work automatically from there. But any other alternative can not be automated and be as good.

For example you said "1% increase per year". Why 1%? What happens when 1% increase is not enough or if it is too much? The problem is that you can't come up with any design that can automatically match the supply with demand to reach an equilibrium so that it can make the price stable. You will either have inflation or deflation. The later is what we prefer in bitcoin hence the fixed supply.

Another thing is the "lost coins" which you mentioned twice. You don't know and have no way of knowing how much bitcoin is lost and will be lost. So again there is no way you could come up with an automatic way of setting a predefined rules to increase the supply based on that.

There is one simple solution to all of this: centralization. In a centralized system the central authority decides how much "money" should be in circulation and prints more of it when needed and decide how much more.
But this system is the fiat system and is tried and failed. Bitcoin won't go that route since one of the main principles of it is decentralization.

Because of the rarity of Bitcoin, the value of Bitcoin has risen.
If there is no upper limit on Bitcoin's supply, then it is no different from ordinary coins.
Others invest in Bitcoin because they have taken a fancy to the scarcity of Bitcoin. If it becomes less scarce, then it has no investment value for these people.

Your entire analogy is flawed because the banana is not being made bigger. It is the same size, but being cut in to smaller pieces. If you add three more decimals to bitcoin, you have not increased the cap by 1000x. The new smallest units are a thousand times smaller then the old smallest units. There is the exact same amount of bitcoin in circulation as there was before, regardless of whether you consider it as 21 million bitcoin, 2,100 trillion sats, or 2.1 million trillion millisats.

If you add more decimals, you are cutting up the same amount of bitcoin/banana in to smaller pieces. Only if you raise the marketcap is the bitcoin/banana being made bigger and less scarce.

Satoshi talked about even moving the decimal point, let alone just adding more decimal places:

Yep. Pretty cool, huh? No matter how damaging it is for the economy, we're fine, because it's benefiting us. Who cares about inflation when you can simply keep your currency and increase your future purchasing power!? Sorry for the irony, but that's Bitcoin. It skips some economic rules we were living by so far and incentivizes those who hold it, because it makes them richer.

At the moment you can't convince anyone to change Bitcoin; especially the market cap. You see, there are tons of users who have bought it to escape the arbitrary inflation of centrally managed currencies, as one had said (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=238.msg2004#msg2004).

I actually prefer a flexible system that regulates supply based on current demand and supply. The system regulatory system has to be decentralized, trustless, permissionless, etc. Anyone can participate by having their reserved coins locked automatically when demand & price are low ...unlocked and sold to buyers when demand and price are too high. I actually agree that the price should increase/decrease moderately to prevent the extreme price volatility and make Bitcoin better MoE

you really do not understand your own analogy.
remember in bitcoin base code, in raw data..
there is not btc.. no banana

when you finally admit or realise or remember that the actual unit of account at binary is

100101010000001011111001000000  ( you refer to it as 8decimal 6.25btc)
and you want to change that into
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000 (11 decimal 6.25btc)

you can clearly see the binary number(banana) is bigger(MORE significant figures)

just because you want to say the human converted basket term still says "6.25 bananas' does not mean the banana is the same size


it means there are more binary numbers to share
emphasis TO SHARE
emphasis SHARE
emphasis less scarce

yes imagine if they decided that a block using standard sats as primary base unit. but they want to increase how many btc is created at 8 decimal by 1000x btc..
guess what the binary unit will be
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000
..
yep
again
it doesnt matter your new prefered HUMAN converted basket term is
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000= (6.25btc of new format) 625000000000msat
or
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000=6250btc(625000000000sat)
its the same shareable units

which is different to the standard/current sharable units of
100101010000001011111001000000
..

can you see the difference in size??
100101010000001011111001000000
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000


you concentrating on "same bitcoin" is nonsense stupidity of misunderstanding because even you should know that at data level of shareable units from 2009 is not the same unit as the human GUI basket term

you can pretend that its the same banana/same size
but when changing
100101010000001011111001000000 to 1001000110000100111001110010101000000000
does then require
btc= 625000000/100,000,000
becoming
btc= 625000000000/100,000,000,000

What you saying would only make sense if the new smallest units (millisats) were worth the same as the old smallest units (sats), but they aren't.

If I split a gold ingot in to 1000 gold coins, there is the exact same amount of gold. I do not have any more to share than I did before, I have not increased the supply, and I have not made it less scarce.

If I split a bitcoin in to ten 0.1 outputs, one hundred 0.01 outputs, one million 100 sat outputs, one hundred million sats, or one hundred billion millisats, there is the exact same amount of bitcoin. I do not have any more to share than I did before, I have not increased the supply, and I have not made it less scarce.

Lightning already uses millisats. If people agreed with your point of view that this is equivalent to increasing the supply by 1000x, then the price should have tanked to $45 per BTC. This obviously hasn't happened, because dividing up sats in to millisats is not the same as raising the supply to 21 billion.

you are again trying to assume the world works at bitcoin creation then split

get out of your delusion.

ask yourself at binary level of bitcoin
where today 6.25btc is shown and logged and fixed at
100101010000001011111001000000  

where as in a new world of millisats how would the millisat representation appear as?
hint: 1001000110000100111001110010101000000000

and then in another delusional world how a system producing 6250btc of 8 decimal would be represented?
hint: 1001000110000100111001110010101000000000

you soon realise both msat (6.25 11decimal) and 6250btc of (sat /100m(8decimal btc))
BOTH appear as
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000

do you get that yet!!!
more sharable binary digits.. or in the case of your new gold analogy.. more particles particles of gold

your trying to say that what was
625000000 nanograms of gold (human mathed at 0.65milligrams and then buzzworded as '6.25gold coin)
and then having
625000000000 nanograms of gold(human mathed at 625milligrams, but buzzworded as still '625 coin')

which is where you are not understanding the physics and the chemistry of sharable units from the nanogram level which in reality is a bigger lump of gold being pretended to be the same as the smaller lump before your delusion started

..

you are trying to confuse the issue with the banana split while avoiding the biology of cell multiplying
something i find strange from someone that is supposedly in the medical field

even you know that the block halving events is not technically btc/2 but binary -1bit

also..
saying that because another network has more decimals in its contracts has nothing to do with bitcoin.
bitcoin network is not the lightning network

if people on LN want to play with 11 decimals so be it. but stop thinking another network is a good excuse to mess with bitcoin

havnt you realised it yet
LN was not created to be compatible with bitcoin.. it was set to function with many coins
it is actually a fact that bitcoin is being changed to be more compatible with LN

if you want to change bitcoin to have more binary digits that can be shared. then that is breaking the 2009 scarcity promise rule

get out of your delusions of the human GUI display and understand the code rules


your top down delusions is just your avoidance tactic of not understanding/ignoring/dismissing the real rule of bitcoin

because bitcoins rule is bottom up not top down

so try to understand, conceive how things work from the binary/smallest unit measure prospective that is the real rule

the way i understand it the same bit would still be used (8th). (or whatever it is im not a programmer). not the NEW least significant bit, the OLD least significant bit would still be the one used for halving.

IOW you do count from the "top" (most significant bit) not the bottom (least significant bit). its just easier to use the LSB at the moment as its simpler to code in binary arithmetic (just a single opcode? pretty sure all CPUs have a "number=number-1 opcode).. the code would simply not use the LSB anymore and use the 8th MSB (or whatever the term is again not a programmer but the idea seems pretty simple).

I think that franky has confused scarcity with shareability. By definition, scarcity is the state of being in short supply. The supply remains the same; the thing that changes is the shareability. These two have nothing in common.

If I own 1 BTC and it can be divided into 100,000,000 people's wallets, but then they also cut each satoshi to 1,000 millisats, it doesn't make my Bitcoin more scarce than before. It just can be divided into more people's wallets. You can only make something scarcer if you change the supply and that is taken directly from its definition.

Just think it in another way. If Bitcoin could be divided into unlimited pieces; if it had not a specific number of decimal places, but could expand indefinitely, would it make it no scarce at all? Get real.

if i had a 21 gold nuggets that had 100million nanograms in europe
and i had 21 gold nugget that had 100billion nanograms in america

you can pretend that its just 21 nuggets per country
but reality is europe can only share gold with upto 100million people
  -meaning not all europeans can get a bit of gold
but reality is america can share gold with upto 100billion people
  -meaning americans could get 3000 bits of gold each

so american gold is less scarce



the funny part is when validating a transaction value in a raw tx data
a value from a 2015 transaction of 6.25btc is
100101010000001011111001000000  /100,000,000

but if you put that same /100,000,000 to the deluded 6.25 of the millisat
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000 /100,000,000
you would get 6250btc

think about it. if you change the /100,000,000 to /100,000,000,000
you also break the old transactions by making 6.25 become 0.00625

so the code has to be ripped apart and changed and then using different cludgy math to try to not cause a bug where 6250btc is created when it should be 6.25btc
or avoid a bug where 6.25 old tx is then deemed 0.00625

FTFY.

if each american can have 3000bits of gold
and each european cant all have a single bit of gold

then the american gold is less scarce

.
look i knew you lot are part of the LN fangirl club and you are willing to break anything and try anything to make bitcoin more LN compatible. but all your really doing is showing that you do not care about bitcoin at all. you dont care about scarcity or the bitcoin rules. all you want is to make your other network more compatible so that you can make your other network try to function better so that you can try to pull people off the bitcoin network and into your other network

how about just be honest with yourself

seriously? THATS your argument?

preeeety sure the devs can handle that. maybe base the tx validation code on something to do with blockhight the tx is in if/when this is implemented.

however you slice (hehe) it adding more bits would require a hard fork (or would it?) so the code would be changed and tested anyway. just like any other new version.

wow
so not only do you not care about bitcoin rules
so not only do you not care about scarcity of bitcoin
so not only do you not care about the philosophy of bitcoins reason for creation

but you are willing to also not care about the auditability or the bug risks..
all so that you can get your other network to be more compatible..

dang..
here is a solution for you
mess around with LN. make LN bitcoin compatible. make LN fit the bitcoin rules
LN has no consensus. so LN can be changed easily to fit. so go change LN to match the bitcoin rules
stop trying to change bitcoin to meet LN's flimsy unstructured rule

I honestly don't know if the above, franky's, post about Bitcoin's bugging risks deserves to be replied.

---

You fail to understand that if we cut a nugget to 100 million pieces and each American can't have a bit of gold it doesn't make it less scarce, but less shareable. That's all it does. If 1,000 of American bits are equal with 1 Europian bit, then they all have the same amount of gold; the ownership of gold in America is just a thousand times cheaper.

Given how 1 Bitcoin is 100,000,000 satoshis, it's not a problem that the population is growing or that the demand for Bitcoin is rising. We can simply move to thinking about BTC in terms of mBTC or even satoshis when the time comes that it's distributed among that many people that it makes sense. A big problem is transaction fees, but if that's somehow solved, there's enough BTC for everyone. As for 1% yearly increase, it sounds reasonable to me in the long-term perspective, but I agree with DooMAD that not everyone supports such an idea, so it would only create another coin. As for why it was created like this in the first place, the limited supply makes Bitcoin starkingly different from fiat.

seems the same rules to me. and most everyone else gets this. it would be extensively tested and being open source anyone can audit it.

originally i didnt trust segwit either so i kinda know where youre coming from. the if it works dont mess with it till its absolutely necessary mentality. so its likely 2nd layer will be the thing as time passes.

i dont do lightening atm. ill wait for moar testing, just like i did with segwit.

anyhow peace out  ;D im done.

edit: btw we are talking about just adding "decimal places" not increasing the supply now. i FIRMLY oppose that. that would NOT be bitcoin and i would bail if that happened.

I guess it was plainly out of the simple fact that Satoshi wanted to create a currency which is not inflationary. The creation of Bitcoin was a reaction to the failed features of fiat, one of which is its infinite supply, which causes its never-ending devaluation. Bitcoin was designed to gain value over time, not to lose it. Increase in users as well as lost coins must have already been looked forward to by Satoshi and they should have been treated as contributories to the intention of Bitcoin having an appreciating rather than depreciating value.

Everyone is allowed to have their own red lines on what rules they wouldn't support changing.  You are clearly stating your aversion to more decimal places and you are entitled to that opinion.  We are allowed to have the opinion that more decimal placed would be perfectly acceptable (likely due to the fact that we're not harbouring petty grudges that cloud our judgement).  One day this debate may end up a matter for consensus.  Until then, it's a largely unfruitful line of discussion.

Also, leave your high and mighty tone out of it.  No one sees you as a "moral compass" sort of figure.  Quite the opposite, in fact.

Again, your analogy is flawed because, as I stated above, the new smallest units and the old smallest units are not the same.

In your analogy I have quoted, the American gold had a larger supply and is less scarce than the European gold, sure. This would be the same as changing from 100 million sats per bitcoin to 100 billion sats per bitcoin. That would absolutely increase the supply and decrease the scarcity of bitcoin.

This is not what anyone is proposing. Creating more decimal points creates new, smaller units, (millisats) which may indeed be more shareable, but do not decrease the scarcity, as BlackHatCoiner has pointed out. It is analogous to comparing 100 million nanograms with 100 billion picograms.

Precisely! Bitcoin as it is now is the best method to hedge against inflation. This is why proposed structural changes that deviate from it will, in my view, not attain the needed support required to see that change.

The idea of dividing the coin by introducing more decimals is one way of bringing Bitcoin towards a deflationary system but whether that'll be supported or not is up to the community and because most people in the community want wealth preservation I doubt anything will change.

People like to have an advantage, and apply ways (not others will) to maintain their wealth - that's Bitcoin (and it's likelihood to resist any other changes).

Bottomline, yeah, good idea but it's not going to happen!!!

Around a page now, we're explaining why increasing the decimal places doesn't change the coins that are circulating. In other words, if we had four more subunits, it wouldn't affect Bitcoin's inflation rate.

The community also wants to replace fiat currency with it, because they believe that money shouldn't be controlled by those who prevail in the society; that money is a social construction and shouldn't be used as an imposition of power and control.

But, we can't have both. One of them has to go. History has proven that keeping a deflationary currency whose inflation isn't managed by the government brings lots of problems to the economy.

when you realise that bitcoin code has no decimal places
that decimal places only exist in the GUI after some math..

think about this
without changing anything about blockstructure or transaction length or consensus rules
without changing any of the audit checks. without changing any rule

you can play around with the decimal and make it so that there are more decimals..
but then you are impacting how many btc exist.
because a btc is not a code structure. its a human buzzword..
yep you could easily just do the /100,000,000 and change it to 100billion. and have 11 decimal coins.. but now you have 1000x less buzzword 'btc'
WITHOUT breaking the hard rule

because the hard rule is not actually about btc.. its about satoshi

 you will realise the flaws in you and your chums thoughts(im calling you chums because you read from the same flawed scripts)

there is no decimal in a raw tx.
there is no decimal in the blockchain data

when you can actually articulate and understand the real CODE rule and the binary value.. then come back and have a discussion

changing
100101010000001011111001000000  
to
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000

comes with these problems:
a. it breaks the rule around there being 30 more halvings left and increasing that to 40 more halvings
b. it requires alot more cludgy code to cross-convert a utxo value pre change vs post change
    meaning alot more code to check which block the utxo is from to work out if it should be /100m or /100bill
c. the amount of maximum units is no longer near  2099999997690000, but becomes more than that by a factor of 1000
d. to truly emphasise the ignorance of LN people ..
    its not changing the decimal.. as thats 5yo human buzzword.. its actually making there be 1000x more units of measure produced per block
e. changes transaction lengths
f. needs more rules to value check that nothing is lost when converting old value to new value

if people can stop playing the silly word games and actually understand the technical rules. then they will see their flaw


satoshi knew that btc was a human construct after the fact and not the hard rule
thats why in the early years he did not care about 1btc being 2 decimal and saying it can be more.. because the btc thing was not the rule. satoshi put in the hard limit of the satoshi units first. and called an allotment of 100,000,000 of then as a btc as the afterthought. allowing for upto 8 decimals.
so him seeing 2 decimals or 4 decimals was of no harm..

but breaking the satoshi measure is harmful.
pretending its not is just the lack of altnet lovers care for bitcoin because all they want is to make another network compatible without trying to change the other network but wanting bitcoin to change to fit their other network

and the real funny part is
i have explained hard data. actual binary numbers, ive explained the significant figures. and how it impacts how many halvings and how many units of measure. i have explained the flaws and bugs that are possible

but the altnet fangirls all they want to say it 'its just changing the decimals'
sorry but thats not even a whole answer or reason or excuse. thats just ignoring the practical issues ignoring the technical issues and ignoring the changes to the hard rules and audit checks.

Actually there's no rule about that. The only rule is that coins will be 21 million. Whether the halvings are 64 or 1,000, the circulation approaches the 21,000,000 BTC as promised.

Okay, so it requires coding, obviously. Is there a consensus change that wouldn't require coding?

Again, the circulation won't exceed the 21,000,000 and that's all it matters. Satoshi didn't promise 2099999997690000 sats neither 20,999,999.97690000 BTC. He considered it enough to just say that they'll essentially be 21,000,000. That's why he left room for more subunits; because no matter the number of extra decimal places, it'd never be more than 21,000,000.

That's a valid point. Not that significant to not attempt implementing the extra subunits if we ever needed them, but it is indeed an extra weight if we measure everything in millisats.

Isn't that part of the coding?

SHOW ME THE BITCOIN CODE THAT SAYS
"there will only be 21mill coins"
.. cant? well i wonder why

and ill show you the code that says there were only 5000000000 sats per block from 2009 which half every 210,000 blocks which create a presumed total of
2099999997690000 units ever created

he dod not leave enough room for more subunits
do you not understand the binary

bitcoin code and rule is not based on the btc measure..
the btc measure is a human construct at the GUI  level. not the base binary data level

try and find a transaction anywhere in the blockchain where the value in raw binary numbers for btc is 1.00000000
you will not find it.

it is and has always been 100000000

its truly amazing but not surprising that even after so many posts in this topic and thousands of posts over the years/. certain people dont grasp or want to admit knowing about the real rules and the binary numbers and the actual rules

The Bitcoin's source code is the way the computers will perform the specific tasks we've agreed. The people are those who predetermine the consensus rules.

The 21,000,000 coins isn't just a result from a consensus rule agreement, but also a principle (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Principles_of_Bitcoin).

and your proposing to change the rules
can you even listen to yourself

all nodes 0.1 to 0.21 would see
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000
as 6250btc

it would only appear as "still 6.25btc" to new nodes that are breaking the old binary limit
..
lets show you how your being naive.. lets swap shoes and use a different bitcoin feature

lets make it where i suggest the hard rule is 10minute blocks
you would argue no, its actually a hard rule of 2016 blocks over 2 weeks which has many other aspects that protect that. such as difficulty adjustment
and then i rebutt trying to get you to ignore all that and just fixate on a 10minute rule that doesnt have the difficulty adjustments and other protections

..
you and your chums want to break a hard rule by pretending the human expression is the rule and not the fixed binary value and data

you want to change the binary data
you want to change the significant figures
you want to change the math
you want to change the amount of halvings
you want to change the auditing checks
you want to change the other checks
you want to change the values recognised by current nodes
you want to then add alot of cludgy code to the misrepresent numbers
you want to then add more cludgy code to avoid the bugs caused by all of the above

and you pretend 'its the same'.. pfft
stop acting naive. i know you realise the true rules are at the base code level and binary data. and i know you only want to act naive because you only care about getting LN to work by trying to break bitcoin to fit

like i said before.. why not just change LN(the network that has no consensus) to fit bitcoin rather than
break consensus to make bitcoin fit a non consensus network(facepalm)

And the nodes of 0.1 will consider invalid a block that contains a SegWit transaction. That's why upgrades happen; to make the project better afterwards the consensus from the community. We, obviously, aren't going to enforce anyone for such change if they believe it's not necessary; if there isn't consensus.  ;)

Consensus and argumentation are the requirements make a change in Bitcoin. If we all found a reason why the 2016 blocks isn't satisfying us, we could agree upon changing it. No one enforces us to do anything as long as there's consensus.

That's the first reason I can think of: If you decide to transact anything less than 1 satoshi in LN, it is considered an IOU while it shouldn't. Sure, I don't support that we'll need millisats; at least not before the exchange rate of 1 BTC reaches the equivalent of $1,000,000.

funny part is now you finally accept that
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000
is actually 6250btc under the current rules..

you want to blindly ignore all that and just say "well thats why upgrades happen"
again you are totally willing to break the current rules that should not be touched and create more units..
completely proving the point about more units in binary, are the same thing bottom up as top down

 but you dont care anyway because you want the upgrade to happen 'coz LN compatibility'
(you sound brainwashed into being an LN disciple)

so again one last time. LN is a separate network that has no consensus. no hard rules. no blockchain. nothing significant claimed as any hard rule. so if anything should be changed to cause compatibility. it should occur on the LN network.

so go play around with LN to make it bitcoin compatible and then you might, just might get to call it a bitcoin layer. as long as LN is solely for the bitcoin network... rather than having LN as a multi currency network that has to break the rules of bitcoin to make bitcoin compatible with LN(facepalm)


(but we know that wont happen as thats not the LN plan to change LN to fit bitcoin for sole use for bitcoin!!)

now lick your wounds accept you lost the debate because of the binary data hard rules debunked your wishful dreams. and stop trying to play silly games pretending breaking bitcoin is needed to fit other networks. when its the other networks that should change to fit

Or completely ignore you and your utterly moronic and totally arbitrary hoops that absolutely no one is obligated to jump through.  You call it whatever you want, we're calling it a Bitcoin layer.  There is no onus upon us to meet some nonsense criteria you literally just pulled out or your arse.  You don't get to determine what is or isn't called a Bitcoin layer.  As usual, you are in no position to dictate to anyone else what can or cannot be built.  You are powerless to change our current course.  You are no one and nothing.  You don't matter.  Get all the way the fuck over yourself.  

Lightning is here to stay whether you like it or not.  

boring.
more drama from the certain people.

oh well let them live in their fantasy
if they want to play with another network. let them play.
it will be their own fault when they realise LN is another network even if they spend years in their fantasy

no ones interested in their social drama sessions about their loyalty and adoration of another network
especially when they dont even have the talent to make their other network, work. and instead want to cry about how much they want to change bitcoin and ruin bitcoin to make their other network work..
but hey they are so blind they cant even see their own issues and problems

but it is a pitty that they have no morals or brains to understand that their future
1001000110000100111001110010101000000000
representing their desired 11 decimal 6.25 fantasy of a bitcoin rule..  is actually 6250btc under the current rules..

a pitty, but funny how they avoid this conversation


and a little pathetic how they try to avoid any technical discussion and just try to turn to social drama and buzzwords.. especially when they try to poke a bear into reacting so they can then cry they are being victimised saying some has 'dictated' a new course that goes against their fantasy.. pfft.

anyway
moving on

edit to reply to drama queen below
sad, very sad. you are too desperate. you ignore the real technical details just to promote a fantasy.
one day you will learn the real technical details and realise your fantasy is your never ending story you cant escape from. but with your fairy tale. it wont end happily ever after.
LN is 4 years old and still broke. bitcoin worked in its first week. realise the difference in talent you cling onto..
if LN was any good it would not need to suckup, bribe or coerce bitcoin devs

Fucking wish you would.   ::)

Clearly you don't know how.  Forever stuck in the same moment in time, obsessed with the same things.  Stuck on repeat and unable to let go.  It's truly sad.

The only thing I can add that comes to mind is that Bitcoin is based on using Integer math - not floating point operations. Using integers precludes the use of decimals. Why use integer math you ask? Simple - far faster processing speed and no rounding errors are possible. I refer you to http://nicolas.limare.net/pro/notes/2014/12/12_arit_speed/ as an example with proofs.