Bitcoin Forum

..Supply if validators consent?

That's a very naive interpretation. It's like saying people use cars because they have a window!

People don't believe in bitcoin only because it has a capped supply, they believe it in for a lot of reasons including but not limited to:
- decentralization
- censorship resistance
- cheap transactions compared to other payment systems
- having fastest transactions among payment systems considering both propagation and confirmation (aka being irreversible)
- highest security
- and of course because its price keeps rising!

Bitcoin is not a centralized shitcoin to have a centralized authority to give consent on changes. It also has no "validators".
To be honest I'm a little surprised to see this question from someone account that is 5 years old!

Scarcity is not the reason many people are attracted to bitcoin. But the fact that has been presented is what makes people interested in bitcoin. the fact that bitcoin is the solution to financial problems that have always been centralized. and bitcoin managed to get people out of the nightmare(centralized finance), and bitcoin made a new hope with a decentralized system. we are already frustrated enough with being controlled by the central government and it is with bitcoin that we get freedom.

the very first blockreward and every one since. and every transaction are measured in satoshi's
nothing is measured in "btc" at hard data level. a "btc" is a graphic display calculation for human visualisation

changing the supply ruins the whole point of bitcoins offering of never changing supply.
thus losing that trust by changing it because no one can trust other changes might occur again later if it happens even just once
..'once you open pandora's box you cant close it again'.

other idea's were to instead make a change where 1btc is 11 decimals to allow more sharable units without breaching the 21m wall. firstly again its a misunderstanding of the rules and also where the scarcity exists plus it
would be very clumsy and cludgy code because it would mean changing alot of things and then having alot of silly checks and validations to try to not cause a 'unit measure bug'

the mis understanding is that data is not whole bitcoins with decimals. its satoshi units that are displayed on screens as btc by doing math at display time

anyway lets explain.
changing
625000000 units=6.25btc (legacy/native) into
625000000000 units=6.25btc (new idea)

which would literally make anyone with legacy/native UTXO of 6.26btc(8 decimals) only have 0.00625 new style btc
because you cant change the units of already existing data.. so the GUI(display) calculator that does the converting would represent the numbers wrong. unless you then add extra cludgy checks and conversion code to separate old tx numbers from new style ones, but then increase risks of bugs/abuse trying to mess with that

yep there is no actual "btc" stored in hard data. its all sats based. so changing the base units would cause alot of issues that then need alot of messy code to try to work around, prevent abuse of

it doesnt matter if you are trying to change the 'decimal' to being 11 decimals of btc.. or having 1000x extra btc.. at the hard code level its the same thing. its adding 1000x extra units to a transaction/reward and then messing with the display GUI code of the conversion to a btc measure.. to either represent that 1000x extra units as either 1000x btc or 3 extra decimals of btc

it simply makes it cludgy to then try to have different calculations for different transaction formats. cludgy code that can then be abused by wallet software

however. other idea's have been:
if you were to change the halving code to halve less often EG every 420k blocks instead of every 210k blocks. that can allow more coins. but is kind of pointless. we are already at over 19m already mined so adjusting the halvings now wont allow much change to how many can be mined (maybe 3 million more)

EG
we are currently at 744777(time of post) meaning 95223 blocks left of 6.25 meaning 595k coins left of this cycle.
if we extended that for another 4 years
1312500 excess created(6.25 until 2028)
656250 excess created(3.125 until 2036)
328125 excess created(and so on)
164062.5.. and so on
which adds up to about 3m extra

breaking fundamental rules for just a 15% change ruins the trust and promise and hard code rules... for what 15%!?
no majority would agree to that

I see this question as too theoretical and without much sense, to be honest. Aside from the characteristics pooya87 cited why people trust Bitcoin, it is true that one is its scarcity. So, asking something that goes against the essence of Bitcoin doesn't make sense to me even if it is theoretically possible, it's like asking if there could be a consensus to make Bitcoin centralized, which I guess in this hypothetical and almost impossible case, would require a hard fork.

With the knowlege of Bitcoin as a scarce asset, people would purchase more of bitcoin and in turn it'll increase the value of bitcoin. When all the blocks get mined only those that holds Bitcoin would benefit from the increased value. With such a growth strategy, many people holds bitcoin even when the market is down knowing that it'll increase in value when all the blocks are mined after the last Bitcoin halving and no bitcoin is created.

To increase the total supply of a decentralized currency built on a distributed network of self-sovereign full nodes, you merely need to convince every single person operating the said nodes that possibility of mimicking the traditional financial system on the bitcoin blockchain is worth considering and that inflation leads to hastening of economic growth, and that they should give up part of their wealth for the common good. Rational actors will surely refuse such an offer because no one sane would agree voluntarily to become a person who is gradually being robbed by whoever will be in charge of the bitcoin printing press.

Scarcity is a core characteristic of bitcoin that was set by Satoshi themselves. Had Satoshi come up with a smart algorithm of inflation adjustment independent of human decisions and implemented such an algorithm initially, the scarcity of Bitcoin wouldn't have existed, and we would have been using inflationary Bitcoin, but still in a censorship-resistant, unstoppable, decentralized way as we do nowadays with scarce Bitcoin. But Satoshi decided that, in the absence of such an algorithm, the most prudent solution would be to make the total supply fixed and known in advance.

Keep in mind, no one forces you to use Bitcoin. If you don't like bitcoin being disinflationary, you can always fork yourself off chain and spin up your own version of inflationary money.

Bitcoin has a real life usage which makes it a unique asset. Scarcity only adds value to its uniqueness. There are other alts which act like bitcoin too that’s true but none of them are as safe as bitcoin. Bitcoin is the Ferrari of the blockchain world. Just like how you don’t see everyone driving a Ferrari, not everyone will be able to obtain Bitcoin.

Not going to happen as this is part of the appeal and one of the most important tenants of bitcoin- unchanged fixed supply.  If such were to occur, bitcoin as we knew or know of it would destroyed.

Everyone believe in Bitcoin and like it for some reason. It is decentralised and it is very easy to used. All its transactions are linked in chain form and it is open source which makes all its transactions very easy to view. Its supply is limited.  Due to which there is no fear of inflation here.  Bitcoin will no longer mine after a certain supply. And there is no central government or bank control here so it can be used safely and relentlessly. that's why everyone believes in bitcoin

The bitcoin community didn't agree to increase even the block size which created multiple forked coins till date. So I can assume it is next to impossible for the community to agree on the supply increase. Also scarcity is the beauty of bitcoin to be honest. Many people have invested heavily into bitcoin mining to earn their share into the 21 million coins. If the supply suddenly increases, this is going to create a chaos and a drastic price drop. It will be a total mess. So I don't see such proposal is getting a green light from the network participants anytime sooner or later.

I don't think everyone beliveves because of scarcity, I think some of us genuinly support the project weather it be due to the tech itself or the idea it puts forward. I think that's something worthwile exploring so scarcity is not on everyones minds. It makes an impact on the price, but it's not the only nor is it the most important driver.

Why should nodes run a change that has no practical benefit? Artificially increasing the supply is basically just debasing a currency, there’s some people who believe such changes could fix security or distribution by ignoring what this basic concept does. This isn’t a new method and happened countless times with any currency almost, and always failed and never benefited the majority of a currency users.

Such a change would probably lead to a hard fork, and the OG Bitcoin would still come out as the better currency with more value. It’s probably impossible that every node would agree to such a change ever, so count it as impossible. That an altcoin will do it one day, is highly likely tho.

IMO the OP's statement is false. Not everyone believes in BTC because of its scarcity. You see.. Bitcoin is a complex product of our society - yes, I say of 'our society' and not only of Satoshi Nakamoto because the network is one of the most important parts of what we call Bitcoin.

Just try and take the security or the resilience (13 years and counting) aspect out of the equation and see what happens.
You see... I can create tomorrow a coin with a limited supply (that is scarce), but nobody would want it just because it is scarce.

Bitcoin has begone a global phenomenon, a rising behemoth of the financial world and I strongly believe this is just the beginning.

In Bitcoin, everyone who runs a full node is a validator. To more or less succesfully hard fork Bitcoin, you need to have a majority of miners, full node operators, Bitcoin owners and services to switch to the new version. Without a decisive majority, you'll have a fractured community with two large networks both claiming to be the real Bitcoin. Check the history of all the failed Bitcoin forks, most notable SegWit2x, BCH, BSV - that's how increasing the supply would go today.

Alone scarcity is not driving the value. There are other fundamental factors involved too. Bitcoin has brought a revolution in the mindset of the people. Before bitcoin no one believed there could be something like digital currency which could bring a substantial change in the process of making transactions. .

More than scarcity, I think people believe in the BTC value because the coin has been in the market for a long time, and sky-rocketed only a few years back. Ever since then, people have started believing in bitcoin. As the demand has increased,it is causing more scarcity. However, I do not think the authorities of developing bitcoin will acknowledge the request to increase their supply, because this might possibly reduce with the value of bitcoin.