Bitcoin Forum

Hello,

Hard fork will make possible to extend the number of bitcoin in circulation (more than 21 millions).

However, everyone told me that the majority of node runners will not allow this to happen.

My question is why they will not?

Indeed, this will create more revenu for them, as there will be more bitcoin to mine and not only revenu from transaction fees.

what do you think?

Hyperinflation is not a good thing for an economy. Bitcoin price would plummet. I do not think the number of bitcoins should ever be increased.

Destroys the value instantly.

Bitcoin is largely based around the very finite supply of it, and adding more destroys the trust in the network and means that, essentially, more Bitcoin can be added indefinitely.

Basic economics 101, if you add to the supply, the demand gets filled and the value goes down. In this case, dramatically.

If you have 1 bitcoin today, it worth 700+
if you put more 21 million coins in the system, probably 1 bitcoin will worth 350 or less.

And changing the basic make people have a lot doubts about the "decentralized".

Just my newbie opnion here.

I may think it can destroy the bitcoin value and network. They were running on the limitation of Bitcoin.

If they can get fill up which means it was going out from the limitation of Bitcoin. The network will be going to un-trust about the bitcoin. And a lot of nodes will un-validating about the bitcoin has produced by a hard fork(they were validating up to 21million supply of bitcoin and no more).

It's a v interesting question. If you can persuade enough people to fork and enough people to follow that fork then anything is possible.

Humans traditionally aren't very good at looking at long term rewards versus short term gain. Right now enough coins are arriving to keep miners happy. In 15-20 years unless the values are way higher it's conceivable that miners could agitate enough to raise the possibility.

It depends on whether everyone else would fold at the prospect of them abandoning mining en masse. Others may take up the gig. If and when scaling is dealt with perhaps this might be the next future shitstorm. I'll probably be back in nappies by then.

Why not deal with this 21m for now? what makes you want to have more than 21m bitcoins?
It's something in the core code of bitcoin and can't be changed period.

one thing to know

its not 21million rule, thats just named that for the human mind to put the real rule into a less coded, less mathematical concept average joe can understand without their mind exploding, buzzword.

it does create 21million btc. but you have to understand HOW

the rule is actually:
each block reward was 5,000,000,000 units of measure from block 0 to block 210,000(50 btc per block for 210,000blocks)
totalling 1,050,000,000,000,000 units of measure in circulation (10.5million btc)

then it halves for the next 210,000 blocks.
meaning
each block 210,001-420,000 reward was 2,500,000,000 units of measure 210,000(25 btc per block for 210,000blocks)
releasing 525,000,000,000,000 units during this period (5.25million btc)
totalling 1,575,000,000,000,000 units of measure in circulation  (15.75million btc)

then it halves for the next 210,000 blocks.
meaning
each block 420,001-630,000 reward is 1,250,000,000 units of measure 210,000(12.5 btc per block for 210,000blocks)
releasing 262,500,000,000,000 units during this period (2.625million btc)
totalling 1,837,500,000,000,000 units of measure in circulation (18.375million btc)

and every 210,000 blocks the reward halves, releasing half as much and so on and so on until no more units of measure are rewarded

thats whats wrote in code.
which calculates (http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(sum(210000*floor(5000000000%2F2%5Ei)),+i%3D0+to+32)%2F10000000) in the year 2140ish each block will only make 1 unit of measure per block.. and then thats it. no more.


bringing the total ever made to just about 2,100,000,000,000,000 units of measure
more precisely 2,099,999,997,690,000 units of measure (20,999,999.9769btc (~21million btc)

the rarity is that at best it can be split up into 2.1quadrillian parts

however human minds dont like big numbers. so the user facing GUI treats
a unit of measure has been called a satoshi (singular 'sat' for short, plural 'sats' for short)
1 unit of measure as 1 sat
100 sats as 1 bit
100,000,000sats as 1btc or 1,000,000 bits
1,250,000,000sats as 12.5btc or 12,500,000 bits
2,500,000,000sats as 25btc or 25,000,000 bits
5,000,000,000sats as 50btc or 50,000,000 bits
and ofcourse
2,100,000,000,000,000sats as 21million btc or 21,000,000,000,000 bits

---

the main premise is bitcoin would only make 2.1quadrillian sharable units ever. and that was a hard rule no one should change as its an economics rarity thing

---

now.. here is the thing.. although the code is measured in sats and only the GUI / human brain sees btc..
some banker paid devs are actually trying to play with the units of measure that will be rewarded to mining pools.

EG
instead of:
1,250,000,000sats, being rewarded per block they want
1,250,000,000,000 millisats

code form
1,250,000,000units of measure.. becomes
1,250,000,000,000units of measure

meaning 1000 more units of measure (1000x more split-able and shareable(less rare)) which also extends the minimum life expectancy to change from the year ~2140 to ~2180

this trick is done by although at code level making there be 1000 more units of measure. they still want to play with peoples heads by:
1,250,000,000,000 millisats is a btc.

and
1 unit of measure is a millisat
1,000 units of measure is 1 sat
100,000 units of measure is 100 sats or 1bit
100,000,000,000 units of measure is 1btc or 1,000,000,000 bits

they are hiding the split-ability, separability, (destroying/diluting rarity) by moving how many units of measure is declared a bitcoin.

and yes this is being done by developers funded by bankers

---

here is another thing,
them same banker paid devs want to mess around with the halving mechanism and even make the individual blockrewards adjustable as a punishment for wanting more transaction capacity in said block
like this https://github.com/maaku/bitcoin/commit/ad4c77f1ff2c370f67538e01fd082d231b57f2d0

Actually the original code had the entire block subsidy cycle repeat every 64 halvings due to some undefined behavior with c++. BIP 42 (which is full of jokes): https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki fixes this by stopping the halving logic after 64 halvings have passed so that there is actually a finite supply. The change has been merged for a few years already.

Who is proposing this? I have not seen any serious proposal which proposes any sort of change to the monetary supply (except for BIP 42). Do you have a link to a source?

rusty russel of blockstream LN fame wants to first introduce millisats into LN. and later change bitcoins measure to comply with LN.

Link to source?

which will surely decrease the price of bitcoin, the worst bitcoin become worthless , although the currency failure generally occurs due to hyperinflation which is not possible in Bitcoin. no currency that can be considered very safe from failure and difficult period

The deflationary character of bitcoin draws some investors because the assumption is that over time, the value of each bitcoin has to increase. If we change bitcoin, then we affect everyone that has put money into it for the investment potential.

I think creating more bitcoin sort of undermines the system originally put in place. If you can make more bitcoin, then supply and demand won't be the main cause of price fluctuations. Bitcoin should not be reproduced, because then it's just like the banks and inflation lowering the real value of the currency.

The point of the 21 bitcoin limit is that there will be a limited amount of bitcoin in existence full stop. If we keep continuously adding, then the currency will become like fiat, with people repeatedly making more and more and inflating the economy. Bitcoin's future is not one of supercomputers mining it, but people like you and me using it.

Because changing the rules in the middle of the game will hurt Bitcoin making the price plummet. the miners themselves do not want that to happen and so do everybody else who are into Bitcoin.


What good are those additional mining rewards if the price went down to $1 because of your said changes in your post. Bitcoin's supply cap is a political statement made against the inflationary measures done by the banks to manipulate the economy.

what you are asking is a rare situation, yes it is possible to do a hard fork and increase that cap but there should be a strong reason for that. for example if a very big number of coins were burnt (e.g. 10 million coins lost) and in that case majority of users will come to a consensus and fork bitcoin.

but if it is for the reasons like more revenue for miners or some other weak reasons it will never happen.

The 21 Million is the current agreement, and very dear to many at that. But sure, if there was widespread agreement to raise the total, it could easily be done. I could foresee consensus emerging around raising the limit in the future if it was decided that the issuance of new coins was the most economically efficient way to pay for the continued security of the network. Paying for security once the block subsidy becomes insignificant is currently imagined to come from transaction fees, but it's possible that could fail to work in a reasonable way. If the network is funded solely via transaction fees, active users pay the whole cost of security, where as savers don't pay anything. I'm not advocating raising the limit, but just pointing out that there may be circumstances in the future where there is widespread agreement that raising the limit is the best path forward.

Some people may argue abandoning the limit is stealing, but bitcoin is voluntary, and that includes the right of people not to use it, or use a modified version of it.

it is good that the bitcoins are finite because
-the price will go higher and higher
-if suddenly too many bitcoins are put into place then the price of bitcoins would go down suddenly
-i think till 2100 the bitcoins should be 21 million then after the bitcoins should increase .
kudoos :)

I think what he is trying to say is, if there are more Bitcoin to be mined when the Cap is raised, then miners will be able to mine more coins and this would be the incentive to increase it for them. Even if they raised that limit, then the interval will have to be adjusted to, for miners to benefit now.

The problem is, the supply increase will reduce it's value and this will cancel out any benefit that might be gained by more coins that can be mined now. Normal Bitcoin users will suffer the most, because it devalue their money, so they will start dumping their coins, and the price will even go lower.

Any alteration to the 21 million coin will completely destroyed the work of Satoshi, the price and erode the community trust in Bitcoin, it is not compulsory to be involved with Bitcoin, you can use other tokens that are with high inflation,  also the miners have been taken care of with the inclusion of transaction fee

21 million bitcoin have advantages like more price increase and a definite goal to achieve 21 million coins when there will be no limit of coins then there will be no price hike in Future along with its demand.

We cannot rule out that possibility. It may happen and bitcoin can fork. Lets call this fork as "Bitcoin Unlimited". When there is more supply price will fall and people will begin to question it and after time "bitcoin unlimited" would loose support and die slowly. I also feel that the real and original bitcoin will keep going and will be supported by the bag holders. They will want to keep the total supply at 21 million to keep the value of bitcoin. I think bitcoin without any forks will live for ages to come.

There is no need to extend the total supply of bitcoin because 21 million bitcoin could be enough to even handle all financial transaction worldwide as bitcoin can be transfered even to satoshi level so 1 bitcoin will count for 100 million satoshi which can be sent/received.

Miners/node runner will never gonna support any hard fork, HF will just divide the bitcoin community into two half or even more.

creating more coins would diminish the value of the current coins.  thats the whole point of the 21 million limit.  creating more will never be an option, it would be shot down from day one and never achieve consensus

It is indeed true that if the number of bitcoins in circulation will increase the price of bitcoin will potentially decrease. If it decreases in price it will affect many sectors in the bitcoin industry. I am included in the list of the affected person, for me it is a disadvantage, we all long for a price increase and a sudden price deflation will not help but create more trouble.

To my great surprise, thread starter obviously has never heard about a phenomenon called "inflation". You can increase the number of total Bitcoin and miners may earn more Bitcoin, but the buying power of every single Bitcoin will decrease proportionally to the increase in the number of total Bitcoin. For example every citizen of Zimbabwe was a multi billionaire at the height of hyperinflation a few years ago, however nobody had any reason to be happy about it...

The absolute total limit of 21 million coins is the holy grail of Bitcoin. Changing it would lead to immediate death of the currency, because it is one of the foundations of Bitcoin's value. If that is ever done, Bitcoin would have become a fiat currency. Therefore any attempt in that regard is considered devil worship and will unlikely be approved by miners.

ya.ya.yo!

How would more coins benefit us? The point of Bitcoin is to have a fixed capital and not have it changed whenever we want. Having a higher max capital would just lower the value per coin and no one would benefit. The price of Bitcoin is relative to the total number of Bitcoin, just like how gold is precious because of its rarity.

Maybe this is possible but we have to think will this be realy good for Bitcoin? I don't think so, I beleive that the overall amount should stay limited. Inflation is not good for Bitcoin this would lead to the decrease of price, lack of interest for Bitcoin and the end it could fail and be replaced with something else. Not a good scenario.

I don't agree that they will increase the number of bitcoin in circulation since we are always depending in the demand and supply so i think it is not good that they modified again the number of bitcoin. .it can affect the market and yeah like other said the price can also affected and it can decrease the value.. Because we are relaying in demand and supply..

Kept reading and couldn't find a better reply than this. It summarizes the whole thing.
ANYONE LOOKING FOR CLEAR ANSWER TO THE OP, CHECK THIS OUT!

Nodes don't get any revenue, miners do.


Increasing the number of base units by x1000 could have some ugly psychological effect, but in reality it changes nothing, every balance would be multiplied by the same factor and the cap of 21m units called "bitcoin" would still be in place. The only difference from the users' perspective would be more decimal places.
There's nothing controversial about that, and afaik that was suggested from the start if BTC price was to go up to some incredible levels.

Exactly if we increase the amount of bitcoin we will just kill bitcoin. It is just like saying if government can just print more money why doesn't it print and give it to poor.

bitcoin unlimited are not proposing a fork in the way you are suggesting.
seems you need to research some more.

if you did not realise it BU has released and full code running since 2015. running on bitcoins mainnet.
core for instance have made many propositions. such as rusty russels millisats, luke Jr's tonal bitcoin both of which change the units of measure.

also its actually core making demands for BU to fork off.. (not very community spirited for what bitcoins ethos of open no barrier of entry, WAS)
anyone thinking only CORE should exist with no diverse counterpart to level the playing field are people that want a dictatorship where there are no ways to veto out bad rule changes

cores latest implementation that meant to offer extra new features is not actually running. yep. they deactivated the segwit wallet. you cannot make a segwit transaction right now. and are required to download yet another implementation after activation.

BU doesnt require you to download endless implementations.. getting spoon fed by devs in a oliver twist script of "please sir can i have some more"

core so far have had atleast 5 implementation releases concerning the ability to make segwit possible and its still not ready to run live.
also even after activation its not 100% running live. they will make you wait for the activation, wait for the grace period, then wait again until they deem it ok for users to make segwit transactions by requiring you download yet another implementation.

please research and dont preach the 'core' choir especially when you dont understand that satoshis 2009-2013 "qt" is nothing like blockstream funded employee and volunteer intern handled "core" of 2014+.

be realistic

This is basic economics supply and demand. Less the supply high the price, more the supply less the price. I am a bit skeptical releasing so many so soon. This shall crash the price, so in a way I don't think it should happen so soon so much.

day 1.

day 2.

day 3.

I think that now do not need any increase in Bitcoins.

The limits set by Nakamoto were 21 milion bitcoins, and the price is growing based into the miners reward and taking into consideration there will be only 21milion bitcoins, the code were made to work with those limits, and i really believe changing something as the supply of bitcoin will damage bitcoin in value and structure.

I do not think this is possible. Because of the halving that happens every about 4 years, the price of Bitcoin will have to rise for it to be sustained amd to continue existing. I do not think we'll ever reach 21 million - it's going to become harder and harder to get mined every time.

the rule is 2.1quadrillion units of measure limit.  quantified as baskets of satoshis called bitcoins equating to a 21million bitcoin limit for easy human understanding.
the hard rule about rarity and scarcity is how obtainable individual amounts, not baskets volume.

every time the price rises someone always tries to demand that the units of measure changes to go above 2.1quadrillion exchangeable units of measure limit

here is just one of the early ones.. from 2011. pretty much within 2 months of satoshi leaving people wanted to go against satoshi's design (facepalm)
https://i.imgur.com/LQTf22s.png

it was not the first attempt and wont be the last

its an endless cycle. price rises, people then want to be able to split up their holdings to hand out to more people (double profiting in their mind) but if it actually happened the opposite to their greed would actually result

There will never be a number of 21 million in existence because hundreds of thousands of coins, if not millions got lost.Especially in the early days when Bitcoin was worth nothing.
But even that is imo no reason why there should be an increase of the coin amount limit happening.
If we need to do something then add one or two more decimals. But trying to change the limit is ridiculous.Scarcity is one of Bitcoin's most important features.
And if we start to change this once there will be attempts to repeat this again and again and there won't be no difference to fiat and QE anymore.
No no and again no!!!!!

FTFY

nope... the unit of measure has moved from X to xxxx
they would just resized the barrels. to keep an artificial human visual accounting limit of 21 million barrels. yet each barrel contains more litres.

EG
lets break it down into binary


1 sat is 00000001
you cannot go any lower!!

1btc is 101111101011110000100000000

however adding more units does not mean that 1btc stays the same
for instance, lets say.. going to millisats.

1btc - 101111101011110000100000000
becomes
1btc - 1011101001000011101101110100000000000

do you notice that although there are only 21m btc.. not just the unit of measure has changed but it also affects how
it is stored on your computer.

in short anyone holding a value of 1BTC now. would be only holding 0.0001btc if a change happened. because the immutable blockchain has the value LOCKED as:
101111101011110000100000000
which cannot suddenly be magically changed to
1011101001000011101101110100000000000
to ensure you still have the new "1btc"

the bait and switch however would be hidden in code.
it would also require people to redownload and resync the entire blockchain to store 1btc as
1011101001000011101101110100000000000
instead of
101111101011110000100000000

its not a case of having an orange and instead of selling a whole orange, your selling segments of oranges at a fraction of the price
its having a basket of oranges that you just call an orange. an then the individual (old) oranges you then call segments.

which means if you do the maths and look at the code. farmers have to farm for longer. but on the fruit stall sign you have stated there are still 21 million oranges (new baskets) but your fruitstall is more crammed (more bytes of data, more units of measure)

i understand the greed mentality of "yes i can buy one bitcoin (basket of oranges) and it will feed more people(more units of measure). the issue is that 1btc (basket) will drop in price due to supply and demand

My "FTFY" is correct assuming BTC purchasing power = OJ's nutritious value.

You won't increase market cap by x1000 by introducing millisatoshis.

I do understand where you're coming from and you're not wrong saying that it's essentially creating x1000 more bitcoins and changing definition of what "bitcoin" is, but that would have zero effect on the price, other than maybe caused by psychological discomfort and few bad press hits (I. Kaminska from FT would be all over it).

It's definitely not the same as i.e. changing 21m cap to 100m etc. It's essentially the same as dividing shares of a company, i.e. from 10 to 10,000, it won't have any effect on % holding of each shareholder and will have no effect on the value of share capital. So what's the issue?

I don't think The devs and bitcoin foundation will allow this to happen. If bitcoin is produced without a limit it would cause a massive fall in it's value and eventually the miners will have a hard time trying to recover their investment

You said no. I am with you.

But who is deciding to make the limit of 21 millions  bitcoin go up? this are the node runners, the people who runs the instance of the bitcoin software.

The question is what would make them decide to hard fork and to raise the limit?

Those people are (for the most of them) miners. So they own bitcoins and get revenues from the mining.

It is strange because the people who mine have the power to great more of the thing they are actually mining. This was not the case in the 19th century for gold miners!!!!
- 

The coins number is a weird point.. We already have 16kk in circulation, rest only 5kk to mine.. I don't think it's "fair" however a change in this numbers isn't the answer, maybe bitcoin will give their place to another alt in the future, lets see what the future have for us.

Do the people that are running the nodes also mine?

Id say that when we get anywhere near 21 million coins that there will be so many transactions and funds from major adoption that nobody will care risking the outcome of increasing the ceiling.

And also to cover the cost of mining. Why would they do that?
Even if there is a fork, that forked chain would not survive too long.

What makes you think that it will create more revenue for miners? Even if we assume that such change can be forced (while it can't), this will cause many early adopters sell out their stashes. That would send price vertically down and lead to miners profits turning into losses due to their high mining costs at the current difficulty, even if their revenue increases in bitcoins. But losses are losses no matter how you look at them...

As you can see, miners won't be shooting themselves in the foot

This is a very dumb example but lets use it for the sake of simplicity, if there was only one painting of Picasso that painting will be worth X amount of money, if a second copy was found then the two paintings will be worth X/2 and that is the best case scenario, probably will be less than that, so its very easy to see that the bigger the supply of something the lower the value of that object.

Well by that same example we could assume that it might worth a lot more then 2/x  , it is still a picasso painting . So if it worths X amount maybe it will be 0.75X amount and the total would be 1.5X instead of just X .
I believe bitcoins worthy might not drop a lot and still have a lot more bitcoins to go around.

One of those thing that does not make money lose value is artificial scarcity the same question you should ask why governments cannot just print money to meet its need because it does not just work that way. The same with Bitcoin, if the volume is unnecessarily large then I see its value being eroded away easily and the developer would have foresaw this to have recommended a cap of 21million because that would be the best maximum for the coin.

Picassos are not your bitcoins

Every picasso painting is unique by definition, while bitcoins are made fungible on purpose. So two bitcoins will always cost 2x1 BTC. On the other hand, two picasso paintings must cost significantly higher that 2x1 Picasso, even if they share the same view (or thanks to that). How come? Because having a picasso painting in your billiard room is cool, but having two somewhat identical picasso paintings would be just awesome

Changing the supply of bitcoin, will make the early adopters big and small holders to drop their coins, this will make bitcoin crash into something near like 200 dollars if not lowe, the miners at this value wont be able to profit, soo it could kill bitcoin.
 Sure some people had been losted on the last years, but those should make the demand and supply work, and people give more value to their coins.

Trust in bitcoin would immediately collapse along with the price. Because if they change it once, what is to say that they wont do it again. Besides it would serve no useful purpose.

I think adding the amount of bitcoin will cause so many bad impact, the biggest impact is the price when the amount is added, automatically it will decrease the value, and because bitcoin is decentralized where the price is based on supply and demand, adding an amount going to add the number of supply, so it will makes the price go down, and then it will be a bad scenario for trader, because if the amount added is too much it will need a lot of time for the price to bounce back

The Bitcoin system was already created thinking about this issue. They set 21 millions max Bitcoins, because it's a good amount to make the currency worth on long term. If everythings goes as planned, Bitcoin will rise even more, and more people will start using it, making the demand be higher or equal the offer. This is a perfect cycle to let the coin pricing a lot!

No chance to add more than 21 millions Bitcoins in the world... And I don't know someone would like this happen.

There will never be 21m bitcoins in circulation because some have already been burned and permanently lost (losing a hardrive with all those bitcoins had to suck).

It's believed that the great and beloved Satoshi lord of all things Bitcoin premined a million coins. If he's dead those coins could be permanently lost which means there will never be more than somewhere less than 20m Bitcoins. If Satoshi is actually a team at the NSA then they will re-enter circulation when the US Gov decides to crash the price of Bitcoin down to nothing.

Of course, there will be more lost and burned in the future but it doesn't really matter because Bitcoin is divisible down to 8 decimal places. The total number of currency units available is 21 x 1,000,000 x 100,000,000 which is 2.1 quadrillion. The current U.S. M1 supply is 3340.50 Billion dollars. You could run every country on two earths with 2.1 quadrillion units. No worries.

Considering that adding Bitcoin breaks one of the fundamental processes and promises that Bitcoin was bringing to the table, I would think that it is beyond bad and such an event would absolutely destroy a lot of the trust anyone and everyone has in bitcoin, and the value would proceed to jump off a bridge because their investments are now easily made worthless.

Can't add any, can't take away any. Just leave it be at 21m.

Exactly. This goes against the entire principles of bitcoin! If for whatever stupid reason this happens I'm going with a different fork. You can't just make more bitcoins, this isn't fiat.

Bitcoin miners will start thinking just like central bankers. ;D

The more money central banks print,the more profit for the central bankers.

Sooner or later the system will be blown away. ;D

 

Should Satoshi be somehow affiliated with the NSA in respect to Bitcoin development and design, Bitcoin should better be considered as doomed already. And his 980,000 bitcoins would be irrelevant since the NSA obviously wouldn't develop a system for public use without leaving a backdoor. In the case of Bitcoin, that would effectively mean that they could easily get access to any wallet which has been created in the past or will be created in the future by quickly computing the private key through that backdoor. The only way to get rid of such a possibility completely is to change the hashing function behind Bitcoin to something not developed by the NSA or similar entities...

But that would mean a hard fork as far as I understand

Also agreed,Bitcoin is doing great with the supply.there's no need to add and besides holders and miners are anticipating the price increase this year onwards,by hard forking it and adding more supply many holders will get their bitcoin reduced it's price,I'll definitely not into this idea..

I don't actually believe there are back doors in bitcoin that would allow it to be compromised by the NSA or anyone. Claiming it's an NSA invention is kind of my running joke about Andresen being called to speak to the CIA right after he took over for Satoshi. You know, like the NSA employees are being called home for a debrief. LOL

Bitcoin is a cryptographic protocol. Which means it is a enciphering and deciphering tool for messages in secret code (cryptographic) which tells computers how to communicate with each other (protocol). Bitcoin uses a couple of different cryptographic primitives together to form the Bitcoin protocol, SHA-256, RIPEMD-160, and Elliptic Curve DSA on the curve secp256k1 for signatures. The functions Bitcoin performs are not overly complicated for anyone knowledgeable in both cryptography and C++.

Many coders worldwide have looked at and critiqued bitcoins code for both elegance and function. While Bitcoin is anything but sexy programming it functions well for what it's doing. Discovering and plugging attack vectors has caused more code review in Bitcoin than possibly any other single coding project in history. While SHA-256 was created by the NSA, RIPEMD-160 would probably not be loved or used by the NSA because its not secure enough. The NSA has also recently talked about replacing the currently used ecliptic curve cryptography used for signatures in Bitcoin to something more secure. I actually don't believe the security in Bitcoin is sexy enough for the NSA. I could see them building a much better end product than Bitcoin, but it would be closed source and top secret.

Having other people control the network and how much Bitcoin units are out in circulation will make the Bitcoin a centralized currency. Because it will not depend on the people making forks whether to add more Bitcoins in circulation. This is the totally destroy the original intent of this technology. Also, if we do allow this to happen, then the prices will become more and more unstable than it is stabilizing.

There is your answer.

The idea of increasing the total supply of Bitcoin is a suicidal one. Only people that want to damage bitcoin will support such an outlandish idea. It makes no sense in its very core because bitcoin was designed to be an imitation of gold which is limited. If the supply increases everyone holding loses purchasing power so its pretty stupid and has no positives.

There it is, the intrinsic value is scarcity argument (yes, an item is incredibly scarce when it is divisible down to eight decimal places and has 2.1 quadrillion individual units, there's only 37.2 trillion cells in the human body). Either it's large enough to be the one world currency for every country or it's intrinsically so scarce that it's super valuable. We need to pick one and stick with it because it can't be both.

I must have glazed over that post when I read this thread the first time.

I think it can be both. As the value goes up there is more wealth contained in each coin. Like gold. The wealth of the world could be held in gold, but we would be trading gold in micro-grams.

Agreed but we need to come up with a more compact shtick because it looks contradictory as presented. The gold idea is good but not quite right for the scarcity argument. I thought about comparing it to penny's but they aren't divisible enough and money isn't scarce. I can't really think of a good short answer.

Ok for the miners as they can mine more bitcoin but not for holders,the added bitcoin to mine will push the price to lower so if you buy it at $750 to one bitcoin you'll only get $400 for one bitcoin and of course how many millions people will get disappointed seeing the price drop..

it will happen like ETH now, after fork and fork
the value become bad

also
like economic demand and supply law principle
a low supply and a high demand increases price, and in contrast, the greater the supply and the lower the demand, the lower the price tends to fall.

and if this really happen, there will be 2 coin
with bitcoin classic 21m
and bitcoinfork with >21 m

ill stand for classic, with sell all my coin in fork convert to classic

There is no real contradiction

First, scarcity is required but not sufficient. I remember I had explained that already, kinda seems about time to repeat the lesson. To be valuable, something should not only be scarce but also useful at that. If some shit is infinitely scarce but utterly useless, it won't have any value. Second, scarcity is not an absolute category (like yes or no questions), something can be more scarce than something else and vice versa. And last but not least, being infinitely divisible doesn't mean that you will have more of it. In this way, it doesn't matter if you divide one Bitcoin into 100 or 100,000 parts, you will still have only 1 Bitcoin in total. That's exactly where your logic fails

The lost Bitcoin does not disappear. Never. It just sits there, in the wallets, and nothing else happens. This is one of the disadvantages of Bitcoin: the fact that the money is limited. Many, many people will lose their wallets on a long term, so a lot of Bitcoin will be lost. Nobody needs to even want this - it can happen to any of us. For example, a thief can steal the book or notebook or computer or whatever you got in which you stored your passwords but your Wallet ID. In the next second, your wallet can be gone forever. So that amount you had in your wallet is vanished now. This obviously can push the price down, but only if a big amount of Bitcoin will be lost resulting in less Bitcoins available.

It doesn't matter altogether

There cannot be shortage of bitcoins just like there cannot be overproduction of goods. The amount of money is balanced with the amount of goods through market price. If there remains only 1 bitcoin in circulation, the prices will get readjusted in such a way that 1 bitcoin will suffice to support the exchange of all goods produced. Likewise, If the amount of goods increases (which could be loosely called "overproduction"), the prices will again readjust, now in the opposite direction

It would push the price up because of less supply.

Your logic fails when you take a world with an M1 money supply of 3340.50 Billion US Dollars alone and try to run a world with only 21 million bitcoins. I agree that if you don't want to make Bitcoin a national currency then bitcoins are scarce.

At one time there was a $100,000 bill that featured a portrait of Woodrow Wilson on it. It was used mainly by banks to transfer large amounts of currency around before the advent of the ACH/EFT system. President Richard Nixon eliminated their use by executive order in 1969. If you are talking one Bitcoin being equal to one $100,000 dollar note then you're getting closer to the truth. However, to equal the dollars in circulation then one Bitcoin needs to be a decimal percentage of what we now call bitcoins of which there are plenty. 2.1 quadrillion of them in fact. That's not really what I would call scarce. In the "one world currency" realm of the future, none of us will ever walk around with one Bitcoin or one $100,000 bill in our pocket.

What do 3340.50 billions of US Dollars have to do with 21 millions of bitcoins, and how is it related to the issue in question? Scarcity is not binary (either 1 or 0), and as I already said in my other post here, more goods will render the same amount of bitcoins more scarce, consequently, less goods less scarce...

In other words, more bitcoins will be chasing less goods (i.e. Bitcoin less scarce) and vice versa (i.e. Bitcoin more scarce)


Scarcity should not be considered in isolation, it should always be related to something in respect to which it is scarce since otherwise it simply doesn't make sense. Is one bitcoin scarce or not? In your case, the amount of bitcoins should be linked to the amount of goods directly, not dollars. Dollars themselves are irrelevant to this question...

Even if it is one hundred thousand dollars in gold

http://s019.radikal.ru/i613/1612/50/680d32813f8a.gif

And then you can say exactly in which case Bitcoin will be more scarce and in which less

A basic economic principle is that if you have more of something then it will be worth less,  so on the contrary, more bitcoin created will reduced the profit of users not increase it.  ::)

I think you're lost in semantics. It's either it's day or it's night, it can't be both. The sponge is either wet or it's dry, it can't be both. Either Bitcoin is large enough to be the one world currency for every country or it's intrinsically so scarce that it's super valuable, it can't be both.

Is one apple scarce or abundant?

The answer to this question in meaningless without additional info. The same with Bitcoin. It can be both less scarce and more scarce at the same time depending on, for example, which number of people you divide this bitcoin between. If it is divided between 20 people, it will be more scarce than If it was divided between 10 people. But it is still the same 1 Bitcoin, anyway. In other words, there is no absolute scarcity in terms of nights vs days (and, consequently, no absolute abundance). If you don't feel quite at home with that, feel free to ask

They should have thought that in the first year of bitcoin,this is not the right time for that,people have a high expectations of the price by adding more bitcoin in it's supply,people will get discourage to use bitcoin,they bought bitcoin because of the coming scarcity.so let it stay that way..