Bitcoin Forum

Say, at some point big banks and hedge funds make an agreement with core developers to remove the limitation of 21M and have the foundation vote for this?
Is it possible in theory and on practice?

yes, 100% possible

Then the world would laugh and quietly ignore such nonsense.

But worry not, such craziness won't occur. It's not under anyone's control except consensus of the community.

Even if the core devs vote to remove the 21M limit, it still won't make it so.

The community would never allow it. Part of the sheer brilliance of the protocol is that it requires consensus.

My fucking god. The Bitcoin Foundation has no power. Realize that.

But big investors already articulated their interest: they want BTC to be inflatable. Reasonable, but inflatable. Something like: yes, BTC is great, innovative technology, but in order to make it useful international currency, it needs to be inflatable. Say, 1-5M bitcoins a year. The general population ("the community") will eat this no problem. Early adopters will be pissed off for sure, but they are in minority.

Let's say that at some point when big players enter the game, the foundation starts gaining the power. How about that?

TBF holds a sizable amout of bitcoin. Its board members and corporate members have hugh vested interests in bitcoin. They know that raising the 21M limit will devalue their bitcoin holdings. TBF will not be stupid enough to vote for an increase in bitcoin supply.

The migration to [litecoin]* would be immense.


*or some other coin(s)

The network consists of nodes. If such a change was decided to be implemented, it would require agreement of more than the 51% of those nodes so the network can fork and implement this change as a valid one.

My technical knowledge on bitcoin is not an expert's one since I'm not familiar with programming. But I'm sure that you can see where this is going. In simple words: if a "central authority" decides to to something like that they wouldn't be able to without the networks permission.

The network consists of everyone running a bitcoin node, you and me could be running a node by having a wallet with the full blockchain in it...

BTC 2.0. People everywhere would be digging dusty old asics out of their attic for the new gold rush.  

The consensus between core devs and big players could be reached. And a new blackchain is introduced to masses, while legacy blockchain is still running until it's extinction. How about that?

Do you honestly think they could EVER control Bitcoin? That every Bitcoin user would fall into a synchronized team with them? So many Bitcoiners hate them it's unimaginable. No 'big players' can change that. Unless they 'crash' Bitcoin, which is so unlikely it hurts, they still won't have any power.

"Nice cryptocurreny you have there, be a shame if something happened to it..."

is my first thought on that!  ;)

The more I buy & mine, the more thoughts like that are coming to my mind. I doubt that big dogs will let lots of people with their "20..50..100 and up" coins to become rich elite overnight.

Bitcoin is not 21M ... bitcoin is :

21.000.000 , 000 000 000 (bananas)

I think 51% miners need to accept 21M+ coins to have those mined coin's transactions be included in new blocks. If >50% miners agree ...this can happen but that would actually be the fall of their own wealth, coz services running on bitcoin will immediately shift to some alt.

p.s. Bitcoin is not only protected by code, but also by market economics  ;)

Who knows what the poor masses having mBTC ballances decide to vote for in the future. Will be interesting anyway

Then we laugh  :D

I think big players could easily control 90% or more of all hashing power. Say, a megapool driven by asics on hundreds of acres at Greenland or Alaska.

Disclaimer: I am not going to spread FUD, just want to share some thoughts and find answers

Sure they will vote against those who have BTC and Kilo-BTC. The voting will be initiated by those who controls Mega-BTC

I think that would not happen at all, because there are enough satoshi's for everyone  ;)
Just not enough Bitcoins, however if that would ever happen.
I think that situation would make Bitcoin decrease in value ofcourse, and that would be a bad message to the public aswell.

simple answer.

if someone bribes the bitcoin developers to remove the 21m limit. this would only happen on a new update. which PEOPLE need to download.
the majority of PEOPLE will ignore the download and stick with the current version until non-bribed developers release a non corrupt update.

the only reason people update the bitcoin client, is if it is better then the old one. if the new update is screwed up, the error will be publicized faster then anything. and those stupid enough to have downloaded it. would simply uninstall, and then go back to the old version.

 ::) If they crash Bitcoin, they're crashing their wealth, too. And the Fiat Elite's won't want to share power with all of the Bitcoin 'Elites'. They can gain something from crashing Bitcoin. Because they're not investing full time. If a large holder for Bitcoin crashed it, they would face the wrath more than someone with 20+ coins.

Think.

How about the following conspiracy theory: US is preparing plan B: US dollar will no longer be trusted in the nearest future, US dept is off control, there is no way in increase the upper limit of it, etc. In other words US dollar "on the verge of collapse" and will go down to tubes in 10 years.
So they decided to come up with cryptocurrency - a Bitcoin. But if US officials introduce BTC to public - they will be laugh out right on site. So they are asking MIT, Stanford teams to come up with the algorithm for BTC. Strict non-disclosure agreement had been signed. So the mysterious Satoshi is just a team of the brightest PhD students under control. Wide public loves something open source and revolutionary? You got it: BTC! Invented by anonymous guy who donated his invention to the public!
Once BTC is adopted internationally, the real "Satoshi" (US) comes to the scene and adjusts the rules of the game.
How about that?

Disclaimer: this is just speculation, I have no fricking idea who Satoshi really is and if US are smart enough to start the thing like BTC

By then we'll all be so rich nobody will care. If they tried to sabotage Bitcoin in any way, there will be many, many competing digital currencies to switch over to. And not a single fiat currency.
 

In theory Bitcoin Foundation can do that if they controls majority of the network.
But if that's the case, all other people will just leave the network.
Bitcoin now becomes worthless, since nobody wants it.

That is the beauty of peer-to-peer network.
Similar thing with the 51% attack, The attacker is the one getting most damage.

It is odd that the US government is so slow to react to bit coin. I don't think they invented it, but maybe they are smart enough to realize that it can almost instantly resolve our existential debt crisis.

This is not quite correct.  Even if 51% of users actually want to change, they still can't force a change upon the other 49%.  

A highly controversial change to bitcoin would likely result in a blockchain fork such that after the fork two coins would exist: bitcoin and bitcoin++.  Pre-fork coins would be valid on both chains.

Bitcoin++ would trade directly against bitcoin and the market's opinion of bitcoin++ would quickly become clear. For it to become the dominant fork, the economic majority would need to be willing to swap their bitcoins for additional bitcoin++ coins, thereby legitimizing the new chain.  However, it isn't logical for the holders of a currency to voluntarily agree to an increase in the inflation rate unless it was somehow to their benefit.  

Are there any circumstances where it would be generally agreed that an increase in the inflation rate is necessary?  The only thing I can think of is to increase network security should the fees from transactions not be deemed adequate some point in the distant future.  Perhaps the economic majority would feel that a perpetual 0.5% inflation rate is superior to 0%, as it represents a direct subsidy to miners who secure the network.  Note that this doesn't actually benefit miners, as there is no reason to expect profit margins in the mining sector to increase.  It just means that more energy would be directed towards securing the network.

In summary, it would take much more than 51% agreement to change bitcoin's inflation schedule.  The economic majority of bitcoin holders would have to be willing to trade out of bitcoin and into bitcoin++, accepting the risk that this new inflating version could collapse sucking all their wealth with it.  In other words, it would have to be pretty obvious that an increase in the inflation rate was necessary.    

That's irrelevant to the topic. We were talking about the Bitcoin Foundation, and you switch to a conspiracy theory.

How about that?

There is an opinion that the Foundation is full of crap and controls nothing. I am just speculating that there is a possibility that the Foundation is not that harmless and powerless than it could appear at the first look. I almost guarantee the changes once the real big dogs start joining the Foundation.

This.  Then the foundation would mine their weakcoin and you would have 2 forks to eat with

You have things completely mixed up. Bitcoin Foundation =/= Control over the implementation

The reality is that miners and nodes will accept and implement changes that they agree with, so even if the developers decided to do this (which they wouldn't) unless most of the nodes and miners accepted this you'd never actually get a change. Not to mention that the Bitcoin Foundation has little to do with actually how the protocol is implemented - they more of a fake 'voice' for Bitcoin that is basically charging exorbitant fees that supports leechers and in return you get nothing.

And what do you describe as the 'big dogs'? The ones that'll donate 100,000BTC just to join a foundation? The ones that want to lose wealth?

There would be 2 forks, and most likely, the majority would stay on the orriginal chain

This - thanks for posting this.  There will be Bitcoin and this inflate-a-coin fork.  Then people will have coins on both forks and pick the one that makes the most sense.

There's two types of Bitcoin users.

Those who want to get rich from it (anti inflation).
And those who want it to be a frictionless way to transact (neutral/pro inflation).

Nobody in their right mind is going to switch.

Ok well, thanks for the correction. :)

Most Bitcoin users want it to be a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a frictionless transaction system. Inflation runs counter to the store of value function. Inflation/deflation has no bearing on frictionless transactions.

if this happened, i'd invest in other alt currencies because it would totally crash the price of BTC, and people would look elsewhere. since i'd guess that people who are involved with bitcoin own them, i don't think they'd do this.. unless they dumped their coins beforehand.

A lot of great responses and points of view.  Thank you to all who are contributing.

riot

when economics of mining becomes not profitable for many hardware (around some halfing 12.5 not likely but 6.25 is possible, but 3.125 and after are sure dangerous points). some will be tempted at that point to use not enough energy efficient mining equipment that would be stop to do 51%. This equipment can be bought at big rebate or even for free to switch on to attack.


transaction fee will never be enough to compensate with the current size (higher fee will just make it more expensive then cash to transfer so useless no one will pay 0.01 BTC to buy it's grocery at 0.1 BTC ) the only option is bitcoin becoming very very expensive so reward is enough to not turn most mining equipment off and pay for maintenance and electrical cost. this would in fact only delay it until a next halfing makes it unprofitable. the only way out is to get xTH/s asics at >0.05w for 5$ so everyone would have one in his pc or cell phone and tx fee becomes enough to keep them running(tx fee not likely to be enough if BTC is to be used in day to day by user). But this has a big chance to have something wrong that prevent this from happening


the first step will be when buying/producing new mining equipement is for 90% guanrantiy to be unprofitable. the next is when the problem will come the equipment becomes obsolete so mining becomes unprofitable(this can also happen with BTC to 30$, that would be another problem and increase coin supply would not be helpful in that case).


the mining business at some point will ask for block reward that cover cost and this will be the turning point to increase supply. and since they are the concensus they will have the power to dictate it. (most miner don't keep most BTC mine, but sell to pay cost so 20% drop in price for xM coins/Year supply will be acceptable for them)


P.S. I don't like it. I don't want it to happen but the tx fee will never be enough to keep the mining running. so other solution can complement it and not touch supply, but the actual reality point to that

Isn't it 51% of the hashing power can create a "real" fork in the blockchain, not a simple 51% of the nodes?
Otherwise people would create cheap "spam nodes" and take over the network.

That is the way I understand it. Not sure what happens after the last reward block is mined.

yes it's 51% of the block founds so usually from more then 51% of the hash power as you require to find block faster then the rest to make your fork longer.

After the last block reward, the network is supposed to live on tx fee as reward for mining (so mining never end)

Tell them to support Peercoin, then.

Heres an good article similar to what you are saying


http://www.businessinsider.com/bitcoin-is-facing-a-potentially-fatal-paradox-2014-5

The government (or the Bitcoin Foundation) can't really attack Bitcoin from a technological standpoint. All they CAN do is influence/control the market.

+1 Good article.  One of the commenters intelligently refuted the author's claims, however.  With the rise in difficulty, comes not the rise in number of bitcoins (actually lower) rewarded, but the value of these bitcoins rewarded will significantly increase offsetting the reduced rewards.

Bah, I'm tired.

That is what I was thinking but i wasn't certain. If any of us are around in 140 years we might see a real fight between users and miners over fees.

There's also the Sybil attack. I'll admit, I described it poorly in my fisr post here. Link to the wiki for reference.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Sybil_attack

That is a really interesting page. I had only ever heard of the potential 51 % attack.

I think it's a serious threat worth considering, and why we absolutely need to sever the ties between the Core devs and any single entity. If the majority of devs get behind this and are vocal, I think there's a legitimate chance we won't be able to beat it. If you put a Core alert (I think this still exists -- correct me if wrong, please) out telling people to update, I'd be willing to bet the majority of users would without doing in-depth research on it. Being paid by a central entity is an extraordinary conflict of interest. I would never suggest devs shouldn't be paid, but we have to figure out how to get them the funds to work on this full time without being some kind of employee.

Seriously, even having the devs agree on a % and using Coinsplit, where the donation address is put in the "About" page and on bitcoin.org would be a massive improvement and maybe even result in higher pay for those who enable a $multi-billion currency/commodity/whatever.

It is possible but only with the consensus of the network this would then result in a Fork
However I do not believe it will work in practice although Bitcoin has been forked once before by accident
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork

Simply put it would be very complex to do so without consensus since it requires all users to create a single block chain compatible with all bitcoin software.

The conflict of interest thing is a concern for sure. With all the distrust of the bit coin foundation right now they would do well to address the issue openly.

This will never happen.  The amount of btc will mimic about the amount of currency the world has now.  If anythijg they will extend the decimal places out further if a btc hits say 100 million

There's already satoshis and uBTC.

I agree here.. They will not want to diminish their own wealth. Personally they may not care about anyone else's holdings, but intentionally devaluing their own investment is not something I see them doing..

I am not sure whether they can remove the 21 million limitation or not. But if they remove it, then it will badly affect the reputation of the currency. Once they increases the limit, then nothing guarantees you that they will not do it every now and then.

then the price of bitcoin  reduce

Yes.

Not sure.

Anyway, bitcoin (and all alt-coins) is voluntary currencies.
You always have a right use original bitcoin core or switch to bitcoin-v2.0

Exactly right...
I can't see this happening and I think it definitely should not. Once there is enough in circulation thats it...it'll be nothing but success from there onward (my opinion).

One of the major advantages with Bitcoin is protection against inflation. If we removes the limits, then the currency will no longer be guarded against inflation and will become similar to any other fiat currency.

Hopefully people are bright enough to see this. If you inflate the currency you've ruined the last 4/5 years of bitcoins hard earned growth. Ruined one of it's first promises to miners and traders.

It won't happen :)

We would simply keep using bitcoin instead of their incompatible altcoin

It is the miners who decide and if the economics of mining get too poor without block rewards that they are contemplating closing the shop they do have incentive to change things so that block rewards continue. It will mean a fork but do you really think that any meaningful percentage of miners will stay on the chain that is uneconomical to mine or do they also join the majority on the more popular chain that also keeps handing them bitcoins? The change to happen in the first place would of course need an agreed consensus of >51% of miners that they do want to change.

Also I think the opinion that the dent in reputation of bitcoin will cause everybody to move to an altcoin is the most silly opinion of them all. Which altcoin? You mean some of the thousand different altcoins? If there for some weird reason could be a selection of only one altcoin that everybody would switch to that also means practically the same thing as increasing the supply of bitcoins. What reason there would be to believe that if this ever happens that there would not be a second change from the first altcoin to some second altcoin. This in my opinion would dent the reputation of all cryptocurrencies irreparably. Changing bitcoin protocol would dent the reputation of bitcoin for sure, but the alternative approaches like changing to some altcoin are much are worse for the overall reputation and so the incentive of everybody in bitcoin economy would be to show happy face to the change and hope the dent do not last for long.

It is even possible that there is no dent at all and with some spin in marketing the general public does not even notice or agree that there was any change at all. The marketing message could be something like: "There was an emerging disaster looming in bitcoin as there would have been a hugely disruptive change deep down in insignificant details in bitcoin halving the block rewards but thanks to heroic effort of tireless developers and majority of bitcoin miners the looming threat was found early and thwarted and bitcoin will continue to work exactly as it has previously worked with no perilous and disastreous changes like block reward halving. Praise the lord, amen."

Actually I have the opinion that there is some nonzero probability of change of bitcoin protocol at some point in future.

then everyone will move to the next best altcoin

1. The Bitcoin Foundation has nothing to do with this. The name may be misleading, they merely try to represent the Bitcoin community in order to improve communication with governments, educating them about Bitcoin, and help generating broader acceptance of Bitcoin. But essentially it's just a random group of people. They have no more saying on the Bitcoin software, protocol, or ecosystem than you or me.

2. In case some developer (which developers would that be, exactly? the ones behind Armory? or Multibit? or Bitcoin-Qt? or Electrum? or blockchain.info? or all the Android an iOS apps? etc) decides they want to change the 21M limit, they can't just do it and expect the world to agree. It would simply cause a fork and the rest of the world would stick with the original Bitcoin protocol. They can propose a change, discuss with the rest of the Bitcoin world, and if (and ONLY if) the majority of all users worldwide decide it's a change for the better, such a development would be accepted.

The Bitcoin Foundation could hark-fork it, but it will be just an altcoin. :)

No, the bitcoin foundation can't remove the limitations. They would need majority support from most of the nodes and miners. It will not happen.

No single entity would have enough mining power to force a change at this point in time. When a change is suggested by the developers, nodes and miners have a choice to either accept the change or not. Depending on what the majority do, that is what is considered to be the real fork and what the others do will be considered an alternate chain. This hasn't happened thus far - so far the developers haven't placed any crazy/radical new ideas into the code so miners and nodes haven't had to think too hard about what they should support. But you can bet your bottom dollar that even if a malicious entity popped up people would stop using that chain and instead follow the other one, effectively rendering the chain run by the nefarious entity useless.

they control nothing, other non evil miners would step in and start mining, and things would continue, the lack of the other miners would reduce difficulty.

what your missing and not understanding is that before asics we had this issue on a daily basis. miners had a small profit margin and as the profit went to 0 for some of them they simply stopped mining. the rest who still saw profit kept mining. even now there are differences in profit for different miners. even if some are forced out there will be others who arnt. as miners leave the profit for others will go up. it ALWAYS reaches a natural balance.



as a few others mentioned, nobody can force this change. it would just make a fork which everyone would ignore. if they dont adopt the change then the change doesnt matter.

The situation was very different when mining was done with one guy with one GPU that he switched to mining whenever he was not playing games on the computer. They could switch on and off at whim.

Things are developing fast into the direction that only profitable mining is going to be done in some few places on planet where electricity is cheap and they have the most bleeding edge HW running on huge datacentres. Whenever that becomes unprofitable there is nobody to step up in near term to fill the gap so that bitcoin economy as a whole that needs the mining can continue uninterrupted. There is going to be huge drop in profitability at the moment when block rewards cease to exist. At that moment all the mining gear at individual homes not in the datacentres has been obsoleted long ago and have been collecting dust at some attic for along time.

If somebody closes datacentres they need to be cleared from the equipment so that the facilities can be rented for some other use and without revenue from block rewards there is not enough money to go around for anybody rebuild the datacentres back up. They do not sit idle waiting if mining will become profitable in the future. They need to run constantly to pay the rent or be dismantled.

Or probably it actually works so that some will quit and some will stay and in this case mining will be concentrated to much fewer hands and getting the 51% will be very easy buying unprofitable mining datacentres from bankruptcies and the one reason to buy them is getting 51% to some one persons hands.

I believe keeping the mining profitable without any significant drop is actually very much in the interest of bitcoin economy as a whole to prevent any huge datacentres ever becoming available to the market for a ridiculously low price as that would be a disaster much bigger than anything else.

Well that's good enough for me....if the limitation doesn't change that's 100% fine with myself and I'm sure 95%+ of investors

Bitcoin would fork. Those who had coins before the fork would find their coins existing on both chains. Both "Bitcoins" would be competing against each other and their communities would consider the other one to be an illegitimate imposter. This could become a permanent thing; i.e. an equilibrium could be reached and the two Bitcoins could co-exist side by side or an overwhelming majority of miners might switch to one fork and it would eventually be declared the winner and therefore the "true" Bitcoin.

The foundations votes don't count for anything. The miners are the ones that make the decisions. They vote with their hash power. The foundation is powerless to force anyone to do anything. They have to convince the majority stake miners to switch, and of course- why would they? It's not in their economic interest to do so. Thus- we will never remove the 21M limit. :-)

Miners this and miners that.... And who owns the majority of the hashing power? The evil corporations or the guy with 2  pathetic usb miners in his basement? If you want voting power, you buy it. If you want the control of bitcoin, you buy it.

I don't think the bitcoin foundation has this sort of control over the technology. They're just a seperate group really.

So much misunderstanding about what the foundation is and does.

That's totally impossible!!
Bitcoin Foundation can't able to do that.
First, it's not a centralized foundation and second it's just impossible for anyone to remove the 21M limitation.

What do they do apart from cause controversy exactly?

So most of the optimistic expectations are coming from the assumption that the existing fragile hashpower disposition will be forever: 20%-ish for BTCGuild, 35%-ish for CEX.io, 5%-ish for Slush pool, the rest 40% for "unknown sources", etc. However, in case of global BTC adoption it is easy for major players to possess up to 99% of the whole network and leave the remaining 1% for Slush+CexIO+BTCGuild+the rest. And not necessarily that possessing 99% of the whole network will cause massive double spending. They will just keep the network with all the nodes. Of course, the "original" or "true" BTC fork will be alive and running on the garage ASICs, and used for minor bar tiping or something like that.

This is similar to gold rush in California: amateurs with shovels are gone since shoveling is no longer profitable; big cartels with heavy machinery are now doing the mining, capturing new territories and setting new rules of the game.

The Foundation is the first step towards BTC centralization. It's like: if you need international adoption and investors, you need centralization and controlled inflation. No more "to da moon" -kinda stuff

Much confusion
Many disingenuous
Such fail

Personally I am not buying this. I want the replay from somebody who is grown up.

If this ever happens, Satoshi will come back, form a new dev team that will fork based on the most recent code WITH the limitation, and ensure there are enough funds to keep them going for a limited time frame from his own stash. The BCF fork will die within a few months to a year.

Who is gonna mine then? The hashingpower cannot grow exponentially indefinitely. We are going to hit a plateau at some point since there is no free energy in this world.

Good explanation.  As the cost to mine increases the mining corporations will naturally consolidate until there are only a few mining corporation similar to every other business like utilities, ISPs, telcos, banks etc..

The paradox is that in order to profit these few mining corps need to increase the bitcoin price to keep their margins.  But if BTC increase less people would want to use it as currency.  It'll be speculated til the price gets where majority want to take profit then the bubble would collapse

The Bitcoin Foundation cannot simply change Bitcoin.

They are able to propose a change to the code of Bitcoin, however the miners must approve the changes in order for it to be adopted.

In the past the changes have been deemed "a good idea" and "good for bitcoin" so they have been approved by the miners (via a hardfork in the blockchain)

How many miners would have to agree?
The main pool owners? Miners themselves?

Bitcoin will fork, price will crash. Forget about it.

We just voted. There will now be 22million BTC. Also we voted to change the name to "electric carrots" or ELC.
 ::)

It isn't a question of a vote or how many people would have to agree, there would be a hard fork. 

Something called bitcoin with a 21 million coins limit would continue, and this new coin called something like inflate-a-coin where there was no limit to the number of coins would be created.

Everyone who owned bitcoin at the time of the hard fork would also own the same number of coins on the inflate-a-coin fork.  Many would sell their coins on the inflate-a-coin (IAC) fork causing the IAC price to drop and buy something that won't lose value each year, like bitcoin. 

In theory, EVERYONE could agree to switch to the IAC fork.  In practice, a change like this would get very little support.

This type of thread comes up quite often, it would be nice if someone just implemented some of these ideas and got them out of the way.  Then the answer would be "look at X-coin" and see how it did in reality.  Look at Freicoin for one example where the currency loses just under 5% of its value each year (akin to inflating it away).  People might use it to transact, but who is going to use it as a store of value when there is another option?  Likewise, IAC would be losing value each year.  Some people might like that, most would realize that it is stupid to keep something that is losing value each year, so the people who were knowledgable would stick with the bitcoin fork, others would go with the IAC fork.

Excellent question

Maybe this is one of the ideas that government think tanks come up with, outlaw "evil deflationary" cryptos?

Removing the limitation broke DOGE's back! It would probably lead to a run on the next best alternative SHA256 currency, whatever that is.

Good luck to them if they tried to enforce something like that.

in this case the history will repeats  :D

Well the protocol is brilliant, I agree.. But seeing as we're what.. 100k strong as a userbase.. By the time big banks decide to do this, it will be at what... 100 million? 3 billion?


Switch your protocol, or use a chain only 100k people use.

Lets see what you choose.

It seems to keep getting lost in this thread. But this is never going to happen and the bitcoin foundation has zero ability to change the protocol. That's all.

The core developers do not have the final say the miners do. If the miners do not accept the new protocol then it will not happen.

Ok, lets forget about "voting" and "bitcoin foundation" for the moment.

How about hedge funds contact core devs and tell them: "guys, in order to make this thing would-wide spread we need a controlled inflation: we need to remove "halving". Lets say for solving a block it will always be N number of coins. You guys will be rich, famous and your names will be written in history forever. From our side we guarantee at least 51% of mining power with the updated bitcoin protocol where there is no 21M limitation anymore. The garage miners could stick to the old protocol or whatever - their old bitcoins are useless".

I think this is very possible if we are talking about wide adoption of bitcoin.

I may be mistaken, but would it require the consensus of everyone who uses Bitcoin (as opposed to only those who mine) to enact such a change?  I am still fairly new to how the Bitcoin protocol is designed.

Celroc

Not everyone. If you have more than 51% of all computing power - you own blockchain

They will be rich and famous either way when mass adoption comes. The only realistic possibility of this kind of change might be a POS protocol to keep it around 21 million in circulation but this would be 50-60 years away at least.

Keeping always  N number of coins (like 21M) in circulation is possible: coins will always been lost due to lost passwords, hodler dies, etc, etc

You are 100% right and this should end up this discussion.

At the moment even Satoshi Nakamoto is not able to remove 21M limit:)

I think what will happen after 21M will be mined - Bitcoin2 will be released :)

That is why I can foresee some way to keep a controlled number of new coins in existence. The currency will inevitably have coins permanently lost over the years and eventually become so rare that it isn't really fungible anymore.

"Satoshi Nakamoto" - is just a name. Whoever has git source code push permission has the real power.

The equation is pretty simple:

revenue = Pb * Hp * (BR + Tx)
Where Pb is the price of a BTC (in fiat);
Hp is the fraction of total hash power a miner has;
BR is the block reward; and
Tx is the transaction fees in an average block.

Obviously, to stay in business, a miner must keep revenue > costs.
All of the variables in that equation can change. The most certain one is BR, and that certainty depends on the protocol not changing.

As BR decreases, some of the other variables must increase for a miner to remain in business. And they all can change:

Bitcoin price (Pb) can go up as we see in the exchanges, but for this to happen, Bitcoin adopters can't be scared away, and this proposed protocol change would scare them, in my opinion.

Percentage of hash power (Hp) can change as well, when less-profitable minors drop out. For instance, when BR is halved next, typical revenue will drop by almost half, causing about half of the minors to retire, which will keep revenue constant for the remaining minors.

Tx is not significant now, but in 100 years or so, it will become more important. At this point miners will include as many transactions (with fees) as possible in blocks. Tx depends on 2 factors: the fee per transaction and the number of transactions. The plan is that Bitcoin will be used much more in the future, and thus the number of transactions will increase.


That would be counter-productive. If the BTC supply were increased, we would have inflation, which would decrease the value of the BTC. If it gets to that point, then Bitcoin is finished.

What if someday the Bitcoin Foundation doesn't matter and almost no one ever talks about it?  :)

If some percentage of miners decide to continue with the 25 BTC subsidy forever then on the block that the protocol dictates that the subsidy should drop to 12.5 BTC there will be a hard fork of the blockchain.  There will be two blockchains:  one with blocks which have the correct 12.5 BTC subsidies and the other one containing the invalid blocks with 25 BTC subsidies.

If you do not change any of the network nodes then all blocks with the wrong subsidy will be dropped - end of story.  So, even if 90% of the miners decide to continue the 25 BTC subsidy all of their blocks will be dropped unless they also convince some of the nodes to change also.

So on that block, assuming some percentage of miners and nodes (and wallets) decide to change the protocol a new alt coin is born.  It is just another in the growing number of alts.  Bitcoin will just keep chugging along and will compete with the new alt in the marketplace.

I hope that answers your questions.

More technical details can be found here if you are interested:  https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=352734.0

And if you owned BTC pre-fork, you'd have equal BTC and "BTC-II" after, correct?

If a central authority were to somehow gain control over bitcoin and start debasing it,  then bitcoin users will exit to the next currency that can't be debased.  Other currencies like ripple, chuckie cheese tickets, and the dollar are older than bitcoin, so one could argue this exodus has already happened.

Someone could easily set up an alternate repository and build system if the need ever arises.

then i will start my own coin with same name as bitcoin x with parallel blockchain spliting at disputed point by limiting them 21M.

At the time of the hard fork we end up with two separate networks building two separate blockchains and the common blockchain history shared by and accepted by both of the networks.  

Let's call the network and blockchain that changed the protocol the A (for alt) network and blockchain.  Let's call the network and blockchain that did not change the protocol the B (for Bitcoin) network and blockchain.  The common history blockchain will be called the C (for common) blockchain.  After the split there will be three classes of coins:

BCTC coins that exist in the common history C blockchain and are accepted as valid by both the A and B networks
BTCA coins that exist only in the A blockchain and are only accepted as valid on the A network
BCTB coins that exist only in the B blockchain and are only accpeted as valid on the B network

If you own coins before the split, coins that were created and exist in the common blockchain history, coins that are accepted as valid by both the A and B networks then these coins can be spent on both networks.

As you spend your BTCC coins they become BTCA coins when spent on the A network and BTCB coins when spent on the B network.

If you hold your BTCC coins then you can spend them on both networks at any time.

Here is what I and many others would do:

1) Keep hoarding (saving), buying, collecting, using, my BTCB (real Bitcions) as I did before the split.
2) Wait until the A network builds up and the BTCA (new inflato alt) coins become worth something.
3) Dump all my BTCA coins and use the profit to buy more BTCB coins, leaving some poor sucker holding the soon to be worthless BTCA coins.

hopefully it will not happen, but if what happened was bad possibilities that will arise.

Bitcoin Foundation would never do such a disruptive thing.
Anyways, you would need to fork bitcoin, and you cant do that without atleast 51% hashrate, therefore bitcoin foundation alone cant do any major things without comunity backing that up.

cheers

A hard fork can be done with any amount of hashing.  You don't need 51%.  You are confused. 

Hm... let me guess... nothing will happen, I suppose

The hard fork coin would need to be accepted by the miners in order for it to have any kind of security.

Unlikely to happen. If it does, bitcoin holders can just sell it off to move to another coin.

Wont the exchange rate go through the floor?

Im slightly curious. If they do "vote" on that, how will the apply the change? If its an update, cant we vote not to update or something? I have never seen something like that. (Dogecoin did, but I dont know how that works).

Fuck the foundation, they have no authority

This guy nailed it on page 1.  Seven pages later we are back to this. 

Maybe a better question is, what if Ghash.io votes to remove the 21 M limitation!  ;)

Death to Bitcoin foundation and ghash