Bitcoin Forum

So as everyone keeps coming up with these new coins and new algorithms, how do they decide how many total coins to offer? I know LTC is exactly 4X as many BTC. Can anyone shed any light on this, or is it completely random and up to each individual coin maker? What are the possible positive and negative impacts on a somewhat random, finiate amount of coins?

It's completely arbitrary. Choose whatever you like as long as there is a clear and static cap.

was arbitratry for bitcoin also? i remember 21M come up from a math equation or some other calculation

It's completely arbitrary. Choose whatever you like as long as there is a clear and static cap.

So as everyone keeps coming up with these new coins and new algorithms, how do they decide how many total coins to offer? I know LTC is exactly 4X as many BTC. Can anyone shed any light on this, or is it completely random and up to each individual coin maker? What are the possible positive and negative impacts on a somewhat random, finiate amount of coins?

50 BTC every 10 minutes, halved every 4 years --> 21 million BTC total

Other coins use different numbers and different distribution plans. Many coins are not capped.

so satoshi started from the block reward, to build bitcoin

It is algorithmically constrained to be so
Cannot be amended unless the entire network agrees, which is not going to happen

Not really. You can also start from the total number and then work backwards.  :)

Not really. You can also start from the total number and then work backwards.  :)

So as everyone keeps coming up with these new coins and new algorithms, how do they decide how many total coins to offer? I know LTC is exactly 4X as many BTC. Can anyone shed any light on this, or is it completely random and up to each individual coin maker? What are the possible positive and negative impacts on a somewhat random, finiate amount of coins?

What do you mean? Start with 21M coins premined, then "desmine" the coins along the way?

was arbitratry for bitcoin also? i remember 21M come up from a math equation or some other calculation

You already had many good answers to you question. I also think it is important to mention that the "coin makers" (called devs) can chose to add a "premine" to the genesis block (the first block). The word premine is a bit misleading, since nothing is being mined, they have simply started with giving themselves x millions coins as a rewards for making a new revolutionary coins that everyone should invest in.

I don't know if "revolutionary" is really the proper term to use. Most alt coins provide no value that bitcoin cannot provide and their network is much less secure then the bitcoin network.

was arbitratry for bitcoin also? i remember 21M come up from a math equation or some other calculation

Thus, all in all, the total number of currency units that will ever exist stands at 2,100,000,000,000,000: 2.1 quadrillion, or about 250.899. In choosing this figure, Satoshi was much luckier, or wiser, than most people realize. First of all, the number is considerably less than 264 – 1, the largest integer that can be stored in a standard integer on a computer – go above that, and the integers wrap around to zero like an odometer.

Second, however, there is another, lower threshold that the total satoshi count manages to fall just below: the largest possible integer that can be exactly represented in floating point format. Integers are not the only kind of number that computers can store; to handle decimal numbers, computers use a format known as floating point representation.

[...]

Notice how scientific notation allows you to express all of these values with reasonable accuracy despite their wildly varying scales. Floating point notation is essentially scientific notation in binary; when you store the number 9.625, your computer stores “1.001101 * 1011” (or rather, it stores 01000000 00100011 01000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000 00000000, which is the same thing in high-precision serialized form). In this high-precision form, the “significand” (the part that’s not the exponent) has 52 bits. What this means is that high-precision (more precisely, “double precision”) floating point numbers are good enough to exactly store integers up to 253, but not higher – if you go higher, you start lopping off digits at the end. Bitcoin’s 250.9 satoshis are, in exponential terms, just below this maximum.

Ethereum's Vitalik Buterin wrote (http://bitcoinmagazine.com/7781/satoshis-genius-unexpected-ways-in-which-bitcoin-dodged-some-cryptographic-bullet/) about this last year.

Even 1 or 2 of these altcoins has a brilliant idea/feature implemented, it will be worth it. And which is why speculators keep throwing money at altcoins.

If one of these altcoins has such a brilliant idea then what would stop it from being implemented into bitcoin? We have the testnet that allows people to test new features or anything they want so there is no real reason to have to use an altcoin to develop these new ideas. IMP people throw money at altcoins because they want to speculate on the price.

Even 1 or 2 of these altcoins has a brilliant idea/feature implemented, it will be worth it. And which is why speculators keep throwing money at altcoins.

If one of these altcoins has such a brilliant idea then what would stop it from being implemented into bitcoin? We have the testnet that allows people to test new features or anything they want so there is no real reason to have to use an altcoin to develop these new ideas. IMP people throw money at altcoins because they want to speculate on the price. 

Not all of alt coin has something new and just is the clone of existing protocol. The devs has premined a lot. Once the exchange launches this coin, they dump all the coins they have right away and grab a lot of profit.