Bitcoin Forum

I assume that the 21 million bitcoin limit can be changed if there is an agreement to change the Bitcoin specification. As the specification is today, miners earn less and less bitcoins over time. If miners earned the same amount of bitcoins over time, then there would be no upper limit for how many bitcoins can be mined. That would perhaps make the price of bitcoin more stable and make bitcoin more suitable as a general currency.

The very point of Bitcoin is that the 21 mil limit can't be changed.

Miners get less bitcoin but in theory there should be more adoption hence the less Bitcoin they get has more purchasing power.

The main point of Bitcoin is the decentralized block chain. The 21 million limit is just arbitrarily set from the beginning. And in the beginning that was probably a good thing, turning bitcoin into a success. Now however when bitcoin has matured a bit there could in theory I guess be changes made to the Bitcoin specification.

Why would anyone want to destroy the integrity of the very system?

You mean the integrity of the value of bitcoin? The Bitcoin system would remain the same. It would only be the amount of bitcoins that miners earn that would change. The value of bitcoin would be affected a lot, but not the Bitcoin technology.

In practice it could be too risky to try to change the Bitcoin specification like that. Because the bitcoin value may totally pancake. :D Anyway, I thought it was an interesting thought experiment.

The limit was set so that the creation of new Bitcoin is constant and predictable, unlike modern fiat currencies. And also decentralization, of course, but the point is to create a decentralized currency where no central authority can control the amount produced.


Yep.

And if one day we need to have more units we could have more decimals.
Experts say that changing the protocol to have more decimals would be relatively easy and wouldn't even require a hard fork.

http://www.tomshw.it/forum/attachments/gaming/112929d1401796841-consiglio-pc-gaming-12k-fry-not-sure-if-trolling_191.jpg



by the way: there are already coins that have no limit. use them  :)

We don't really need to change the protocol. It's just changing a way to read data. A simple update for the nodes, users and miners would do it, without a hard fork. We can go beyond a satoshi, far more beyond that.

The problem is with your line of thought that you value the tech alone to high.

Think about that: a 1:1 clone of Bitcoin with only the total coin parameter changed would literally be worthless. So why does Bitcoin have value. Because of the network effect. Now when you change such a important parameter that itself attracted so many people, you will not only destroy most of the network effect but also the benefit of the technology.

( Better example, the technology of facebook might be worth something, but without people using a clone, the technology itself is worthless!)

But the creation of bitcoins would still be predictable! It's just that the amount of bitcoins that miners earn would remain constant instead of being reduced over time. It could become too inflationary I don't know. Would be interesting to test the idea on a separate block chain so to not totally crash the actual bitcoin value.

Dogecoin did that. Look at the price ;)

Yeah. Dogecoin started with a "random" block reward, then changed it to a fixed block reward, since it wasn't random and was completely predictable.
Too inflationary? Definitely. You're basically digging an infinite hole, and people have no incentive to use Bitcoin at all since it would just devalue itself constantly.
You can fork bitcoin and make some sort of a crappy altcoin, but it's useless. No one will care and no one will use it.
How would this even help bitcoin in any way, shape or form?

I read that Stellar has an 1% inflation rate per year. But Stellar relies on gateways one must trust. Dogecoin has no upper limit but it has a fixed rate of 5.2 billion coins every year in the future.

https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf chapter 6


/thread

Change in the 21 million limit can change the stability of bitcoins.

Look at the conversion rate of BTC to USD and other coins to USD.

BTC will come back to the same as others

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

These changes require the consent of every bitcoin-holder:

    Increasing the total number of issued bitcoins beyond 21 million. Precision may be increased, but proportions must be unchanged.

Deviation from this changes a fundamental property of Bitcoin so you essentially are created an Alt. While hypothetically possible that 100% of people would consent to this change it is extremely unlikely knowing what we understand about human nature(we are selfish and are not going to adopt a change that destroys our savings and framework we depend upon), and the fact that miners don't solely control the vote but users do on this change.

Dogecoin has no upper limit but it has a fixed rate of 5.2 billion coins every year in the future. I was thinking that the rate would be determined only by the mining, say 25 bitcoins per block as was the initial bitcoin rate.

Completely inflation free yes, but deflation full, which can be problematic too.

What difference does that make? You are still digging an infinite hole, with an unlimited supply. It's one of the best ways to destroy Bitcoin. Are you from the Bitcoin Foundation, or the NSA?

Look. It's a terrible idea. Make a shitcoin to test it out if you want, but so far, I haven't seen and I don't expect to see even 1 person to agree with you at all.

Prohibited changes? Decided by who? Some Bitcoin dictator? Bitcoin Central Authority?

Yes, there will be minimal deflation from lost coins. E.g. lost privat keys or lost passwords to wallets.

Won't work for obvious reasons.

So far Bitcoin is proving otherwise as spending increases during deflationary bubbles as proven by merchant services. So much for that deflationary spiral myth propagandized by Keynesian economists.
Their are plenty of Inflationary options if you don't prefer a longterm deflationary currency. Perhaps you should stick with stellar or fiat if you prefer inflation.

??? Keeping the same blockreward and having a fixed rate are the exact same thing.

Correct me if I am wrong.

how can you change something that is settled allready, and why would you want to change it anyways ?

By the majority of the community. If you don't agree, then you can fork the blockchain and continue your own branch as an altcoin.
You might as well put up a poll and find that you are the only 1 that supports this ridiculous idea.

im curious to know about when production will stopped but when transaaction fee will rape little bit..

I will make a cryptocurrency called fiatcoin. Just kidding! But seriously I think it could be worth testing. I will check out dogecoin which is not exactly what I had in mind but seems similar to my idea.

No, by the inherent design of the protocol. Even if 99% of the community decides to increase the 21million limit they cannot force the remaining users to upgrade their client and adapt he changes. There would simply be a hard fork where 99% of the community decided to destroy their savings and money supply while the remaining individuals retained the foundational principles that define bitcoin and thus the value in their currency.

Why do you even think this is a good idea, and how do you think it will help Bitcoin?

Oh, I forgot. Bitcoin has a fixed rate of one block per 10 minutes on average. Ok, that would be a fixed rate of new bitcoins per year.

At around 2140, the reward would be very small. Miners would be earning their BTC mostly from transaction fees. I don't see a point to have a coin with infinite limit, the price would decrease as coins are released to the market everyday. It is just like fiat, money being printed everyday without limit.

Unlikely because of the free market nature of mining. Manufacturing of ASIC's cannot be tightly controlled and is highly competitive. All it takes is a small percentage of miners who offer free or low cost transactions and that will force large miners to be reasonable with prices.

If bitcoin is to become really mainstream, rivaling the U.S. dollar, then if bitcoin would remain deflationary, then those people who own bitcoins today, which is like a tiny, tiny percentage of the world's population, would become disproportionally super wealthy. Not good.

So, ok, if you want that kind of lopsided distribution of wealth or want bitcoin to remain a small currency, then I guess the current rate will do.

Bitcoin has a similar distribution of wealth as fiat right now so this is not the case.

Bitcoin is likely to become more distributed in the future as well because it doesn't afford easy ways for the rich and powerful to lobby and print more wealth in existence for their own benefit.

What, you don't think early bag holders have been taking profits and diluting their Bitcoin shares with each bubble?

I think the 21 million limit has been good and necessary for bitcoin to become the success it is today. However, in the future the 21 million limit will prevent bitcoin from becoming a huge mainstream currency. Those who own bitcoins today would then become too superwealthy.

Bitcoin would go to $1,000,000 if it became as big as the U.S. dollar. Those who own bitcoins today would become trillionaires. Totally unfair.

By changing something liek this you are making bitcoin worth less than it currently would be worth. No one is going to go for this, the units of measure allow it to go down to 8 decimal places therefore eliminating any need for a "whole number".

This doesn't need to be done. Making the limit higher is the same thing as adding more decimals to the end(in a different sense).

There is never a need to change the total. 21 million is an arbitrary number and the system would work if there were 16 Billion or only 33 bitcoins. If you understand bitcoin then you will understand why is is utter foolishness to change this number. It would gain nothing and severely hurt the price of bitcoin. I, for example, would divest at least 70% of my position.

The value of bitcoins isn't worth anything unless you can spend it. You are making the wrong assumption that early bag holder aren't already buying boats, luxury cars, land, ect...

Bitcoin is already becoming more diffuse and by the time it ever reaches that value (if ever) Bitcoin will move from matching the distribution of fiat to becoming more diffuse.

Don't let your dream of perfection become an enemy of a better system. Inflation isn't the answer either.

It could be changed if the majority of all users agree to use a new client with a changed Bitcoin protocol.

Right... how the hell would an unlimited supply of bitcoins result in a more stable price than a predictable, limited, already known fixed supply of bitcoins?  ???

And how the hell would it make Bitcoin more suitable as a general currency? The supply of bitcoins is by NO means a problem whatsoever to act as a general currency.

Suppose that instead of 21 million, there would be a total supply of 314159265 trillion bitcoins. Would that be better?

Isn't this a contradiction? You say that the 21 million limit was necessary, but we aren't even halfway there and you already want to remove it? Using your own logic, then the limit was never necessary to begin with.

Not that I agree with any of that.

Still sounds a LOT better than having a small elite of private companies with the exclusive privilege of creating money out of thin air. You know, like we have right now, with banks and dollars.

Reading OPs post history it seems that he is experience the famous "Fear of Missing out" FOMO!

I was suggesting that the miners would earn a fixed amount of bitcoins for every block. This means that there would be no upper limit. More and more bitcoins would be created over time without any upper limit. It would be inflationary but I think the value could remain fairly stable. It would be a deterministic and slow inflation. And the inflation would actually slow down year by year! Because percentage-wise there would be less added each year.

It's just a thought experiment. Too risky to try for real probably because the bitcoin value could collapse if doing a radical change like that.

...but it is being tested in reality , right now... there are alts that do this. Invest in them if you prefer to lose value every year.

But what would be the advantage of that?

Distribution will happen as the price rises anyway, no need to have unlimited inflation.

So basically OP, since 21 million units with 8 decimal places ARE adequate to serve a pretty large economy, what you are really wanting to do is devalue the holdings of current bitcoin investors. (Probably so you can have a bigger window of opportunity to 'get in early' again, eh?)

Miners wouldn't like it if you didn't increase the block reward to compensate, and users wouldn't like it because you would definitely reduce the value of a coin. So... not going to happen. Only way it would happen is by force.

The limit has been (and still probably is) necessary to make sure the bitcoin value increases over time. Without the 21 million limit bicoin may never have become as popular as it is now. The purpose of removing the limit in the future would be to enable bitcoin to become a huge mainstream currency. Few people except those who already own bitcoins today would like to have a currency that increases to astronomical values.

What? Why the hell would it remain fairly stable?  ???

With an unlimited supply of Bitcoin, it would only remain stable with a similar unlimited supply of economic wealth and traffic to support it. Which is not possible, since we live in a finite world.

Same amount of total value in our economy vs twice the amount of bitcoins = bitcoin price would halve.

So, sorry sir but you're talking nonsense.

If that's the point, forget it. We can't all have astronomical wealth.

Wealth is relative.

The inflation would actually become less and less every year. That would make the price stable. Not any of this to the moon craziness which would make a tiny percentage of the world's population super rich.

We can have a currency which is as fair as possible. Today's wealth is horrendously unfairly distributed. I'm afraid the same would happen with bitcoin if it became mainstream with the 21 million limit.

Better distribution of wealth cannot be obtained through Bitcoin, or any currency for that matter. The problem is not with the currency.

At least with Bitcoin we solve the problem of having a small elite of private companies with the exclusive privilege of creating money out of thin air.

With a fixed rate of new bitcoins, the inflation will become less and less every year, since what is added each year is on top of a growing total amount of bitcoins.

For example adding 10 to 100 is a ten percent inflation while adding the same amount 10 to a larger total of 1000 is only a one percent inflation.

But with bitcoin there is already a small number of people who have hoarded them. Most people hardly even know yet what Bitcoin is. So it would be unfair for ordinary people to be forced to buy bitcoins for a very high price in the future.

He says it's a thought experiment, so just chill if you don't agree with him.

Inflation would mean what you buy today will be worth less next year.
In that case, might as well just hold onto fiat.

And why the heck should there be any inflation at all after 21 Million? ???

You say that it's because the wealth isn't distributed fairly. That's not what Bitcoin was designed for... not to reduce inequality, and not to be distributed fairly either.

Large economy you say? 8 digits is enough, and if more is needed, they can be added with relatively no effort at all.


Erm... Since when is this world fair? Please face reality, nothing is fair. Bitcoin isn't designed for fairness. You're completely missing the point.

So you think bitcoin will become a mainstream currency with the 21 million limit? I doubt it will. Let's see what will happen.

Look, why wouldn't it? Bitcoin is infinitely divisible. I would assume that that is more than enough.
If you doubt that it will, you should immediately convert your assets into JokeCoin (< aka Dogecoin).

With information technology we have an opportunity to make the world fair. It not only can be done. It will be done.

No, it won't, unless you find a way to implant cells in everyone's brain that eliminates greed. It's human nature.
Nothing will ever be fair.

I actually took a look at Dogecoin. It seems fairly popular, but I doubt it's better than bitcoin. It seems more like a coin for fun than for serious business.

Correct, but it has the perfect concept you want, an coin with infinite supply, for no reason whatsoever. Just because their original block rewards failed.

This is just dumb.
Don't idolize the BTC1. It increases in value as fast as BTC0.000475

Say hello to unlimited resources: Ray Kurzweil and the Singularity - Lew Keilar -- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P9iYEUq9Vgo

 8)

You also need to understand that if more coins were added it would completely ruin the entire concept.

Fiat is printed at will hence looking for something that you can own a portion of that can't be increased therefore diluting your holdings.

Common sense surely should tell you this.

I have to say that that guy is completely insane. A.I.s cannot be made to think for themselves, and Humans won't be connected to a cloud. You are obviously from the NSA. That's what they want to do to us, so that every aspect of our lives will be controlled by them. Ray Kurzweil is completely off his rocker.
You are right, that will create fairness, since we will all be turned into marionettes, ready to do our "master's" bidding, and be enslaved for eternity.

All this will do and make us all equal, which isn't a good thing. Humans will no longer have emotion. No thoughts. Nothing.
Essentially, we will be turned into robots.

Fiat currencies with the horrible fractional reserve banking scam actually has an accelerated inflation!

"For example: if 100 credits are created and loaned into the economy at 10% per year, at the end of the year 110 credits will be needed to pay the loan and extinguish the debt. However, since the additional 10 credits do not yet exist, they too must be borrowed into existence to pay off the interest on the previous loan. To some, this implies that the money supply must grow exponentially at the same rate as economic growth and compounding debt in order for the monetary system to remain solvent," -- http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Criticism_of_fractional_reserve_banking

With a fixed miner reward of 25 bitcoins per block the inflation of bitcoin would slow down as opposed to the fractional reserve acceleration of debt.

So that's why Google recruited Ray Kurzweil as a Director of Engineering?

Yes, that is correct, but why should we have inflation at all?
The speed doesn't matter, but why should we have inflation? To devalue money? That doesn't make sense at all.

Google is controlled by the NSA, and naturally, they would recruit him. Also, that is a meaningless comment. We are talking about his views, not about anything else.

FTFY and yes.

I'm not sure that it will be an inflation of bitcoin in terms of price. The overall economy grows year by year and the small amount of new bitcoins mined per year would perhaps make the price remain fairly stable instead of inflationary. As it is now bitcoin is too deflationary to become mainstream is my guess.

Aren't you just contradicting yourself? The economy grows year by year, and according to you, the newly mined Bitcoin will not impact that much.
Then why make that extra exist at all? Just keep it as it is now. Halvenings were designed because Bitcoin would slowly become mainstream, and the supply cannot be too much to make the value collapse.

The reason for newly minted blocks is distribution. The reason for blockhalvings is to not have a shock. The reason for a limited supply is that inflation is only helpful to few and bad for the masses.

As it is now the miners earned 25 bitcoins per block in the beginning and over time that value is decreased so that the total amount of bitcoins mined will be 21 million. That will perhaps make bitcoin too deflationary for mainstream adoption. By instead letting the 25 bitcoins per block remain constant as a mining reward, the value of bitcoin would become more stable in terms of inflation/deflation.

Again, I want to point out that it's probably not a good idea to test this on the real bitcoin block chain. Because that could make the price of bitcoin to collapse. It's just a thought experiment.

I have zero interest in an open ended production system. These would be worthless to me. It is precisely the scarcity of bitcoin that keeps the price high. As far as the "fairness" of bitcoin, it is totally fair to reward hard work and risk. If you were willing to take on the high risk of buying bitcoins in 2012 then you saw huge gains in profit. If you waited until today to see that it is working and that there is much less risk, you will see less upside. That is the way it works.
I have seen the fairness argument for years now. I remember when BTC reached $1. The forum filled up with talk of how unfair it is that some people made a bunch of money because they bought at $.50.  

There are better alternatives to this, such as OKCoin's Bitcoin Futures, or locking Bitcoins with something else. That stabilizes the price, and isn't a change on the Bitcoin protocol at all.

I think it's perfectly fine that those who have invested in bitcoins can make huge gains. That's a part of the game. It's when bitcoin is meant to become mainstream that it will become a problem. I don't think bitcoin can become mainstream because of the massive increase in value that it would result in.

The constant change in price is very different than other money and can be confusing. I try thinking of BTC like a big pie. A few years ago if you had said "Cut me a $5 slice of pie please", you would have received a nice juicy slice.  Today you would only have a thin line of crumbs. But so what. You still have $5 in pie and can buy a $5 toy or whatever. The size of the slice is completely irrelevant. For example, we could just start counting Satoshis instead of bitcoins. That would make the current rate something like $0.0000058 ; far less than one penny a piece. Would that make it seem affordable?

This is a lot like how the gold market works. If there is an increase in demand, then the price goes up because you can't just make more gold. At that point people start trading in grams of gold instead of ounces. It is also why hotdogs make a terrible currency. As more people make hotdogs to spend the price of hotdogs would drop lower and lower, destroying any value you are trying to store.

The mainstream are just going to have to re-learn money. The debt-based fiat dollars that the banks issue now have lost some 96% of their value and are on seriously shaky ground. I want money that can't be tampered with by anyone. Money that is influenced only by supply and demand.  Money that anyone, rich or poor, can use. 

Ok, having bitcoin deflationary may work for mainstream use, but I still think many people will think it's unfair that they have to buy bitcoins when they become very expensive. The constant increase of bitcoins as I propose will make the pie bigger forever, yes, but the increase will be less and less percentage-wise since the overall number of bitcoins would grow. So the inflation would become limited that way. Actually I learned that Dogecoin works like my proposal. And the Dogecoin chart shows a decrease of price but it may be flattening out! I will check the Dogecoin chart again later to see how the price develops.

Where did you get the vibe that bitcoin tries to solve "unfairness" in the world. Is there anything fair in the world? Is Fiat fair?

Tell me one good reason, why a crypto has to be fair to succeed!

The cryptocurrency has to be fair for the general public to accept it as a general currency. Today bitcoin is economically mainly an investment tool for a few people. Dogecoin may overtake bitcoin as the most popular currency for practical shopping use etc.

You keep saying this is a merely a thought experiment but it is not. Inflationary currencies have been around forever and exist today. If you prefer inflation than by all means switch to Stellar or Dogecoin.... There are thousands of inflationary currencies that exist to choose from... can we just have one slightly deflationary one to use without people demanding that it conform to their inflationary wishes?

Good luck with your currency that is constantly dropping in value-

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/dogecoin/#charts

Doge has been in constant free-fall since last April and just lost another 5% this week.

This may be a spoiler alert, but dog-coin, or whatever it's called, is not going anywhere. Like a lot of alt coins, it fails because it solves a problem that does not exist. Sure it's inflationary, that is why it is steadily going down in value. Why would I want that?

Also I think OP didn't think about the most important part: Integrity.

What would happen to the trust into bitcoin, if one of the most basic part of the promise is broken?

There is a reason for that! Most people wanting inflatory Bitcoins have nearly no bitcoin holdings. So making a fork would yield them no reward, so they don't do it.

Big Bitcoin holders wouldn't want such a thing anyway, also they don't want to hurt bitcoin by maybe confusing some newbies.

(On a sidenote: Spin-offs will happen in the future, there is a big thread about it!)

I think that adding more decimals is more of a question than adding or subtracting the amount of coins, lets say the bitcoin hit a million dollars a coin, then for sure there would be a need to add more decimals, unless a dollar then equals just pennies today. I think adding more decimals is something that will probably need to be done. (probably not in our lifetimes)

I have to correct what I wrote about Dogecoin. It's not until 2015 it will go into a fixed coin rate:

"Dogecoin has a fast initial coin production schedule: there will be approximately 100 billion coins in circulation by the end of 2014 with an additional 5.2 billion coins every year thereafter." -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dogecoin

So it's in 2015 it will be interesting to see how the price of Dogecoin changes.

Actually, lets assume 1 satoshis is the smallest unit, then given our legacy notation of 2 digits, 100 satoshis will be "1" basic unit. We would basically only need to increase digits if 1 smallest unit was way worth more than 1 cent.

100 satoshis = 1$
21000000 BTC = 21.000.000.000.000 market cap = 21 trillions.

So I'd say if this Bitcoin thing is no fad, then 21 trillions should be well in the range of the possibilities. So new digits in our lifetime , yay!

Is this just another sad disguised Doge pump thread?

Nah, look at OPs posting history. He is spamming the forum with hidden "anti"-bitcoin crap for days. I think it is due to "fear-of-missing-out" FOMO!

The op has been a member here since 2011, I don't know how you could be here and not hold at least a few coins.

I can tell you why!

Let me present you his FIRST post in this forum, in May 2011:

No, but I must admit that I installed a Dogecoin wallet. ;D That's a topic for the altcoin section however.

It's a bad idea to change the 21 million bitcoin limit.

Ray Kurzweil has some brilliant ideas. 
He also has some foolish ones like "immortality" and "spiritual machines".

Anyway, I don't see a single benefit to changing the 21 million BTC limit.

Why is this troll thread already 6 pages long?

Presumably because he purchased the account, note the two year gap in activity and total change in character.

In any case, this is offtopic for the technical discussion area. Any such system wouldn't be Bitcoin. Cheers.