This chart says nothing about the (market) value of Bitcoin over time. Value is the quotient of demand over supply. All this chart shows is the supply. If there's no demand for Bitcoin, its value will be zero.

"Infinity" patch for Bitcoin Core

If you…

• run a full node
• are a user, not a miner
• don't particularly care how large the blocks are
• are concerned about undiscovered bugs in Bitcoin Unlimited
• want to support SegWit and larger blocks

…then this patch is for you.

This patch contains the minimal changes necessary to make Bitcoin Core accept blocks of any size (up to the overall message size limit of 32 MiB). It does this without removing or neutering the protections against blocks with excessive numbers of signature operations ("sigops"). The maximum number of sigops allowed scales linearly with the size (weight) of the block.

Blocks at or smaller than Core's current limit are treated exactly the same as by unpatched Bitcoin Core, meaning this patch will have no effect until and unless a hard fork to larger blocks occurs.

If a hard fork does occur, nodes running this patch will follow whichever chain demonstrates the most work, regardless of the sizes of the blocks in that chain. This means that nodes running this patch may diverge from nodes running unpatched Bitcoin Core. Apply this patch only if you understand and agree to bear the risks involved.

Why might you want to use this patch?

Core users: If there's a hard fork, you're going to want a way to control your BTU balance. Your Core wallet won't see BTU-only outputs. You could run an instance of Bitcoin Unlimited alongside your Bitcoin Core node to access these BTU-only outputs, but you might be concerned about bugs in Bitcoin Unlimited, and you might not want to actively participate in this whole "emergent consensus" thing. By running a second Bitcoin Core instance with this "Infinity" patch, you will be able to access your BTU balances without needing to run Bitcoin Unlimited.

Unlimited users: If you want to increase on-chain capacity, then you might want to support both SegWit and larger base blocks. Maybe you don't really know what to set "EB" and "AD" to; maybe you'd rather not have to care. If you simply want to follow whichever chain has the most work, then you don't need the complexity (and risks) of Bitcoin Unlimited. By running your node with this "Infinity" patch, you will have the best of both worlds.

Where is the patch?

You can get the patch for your preferred version of Bitcoin Core here (see the links at the bottom).

Bitcoin is naturally inflationary until the block subsidy ends some time in the first half of next century, but in reality it will become deflationary much sooner than that, as people are constantly losing their keys. We can't predict the rate at which people lose access to their bitcoins, so the charts in this thread only show the scheduled bitcoin money stock.

Okay, you can keep using your inflating, depreciating money, and I'll use my deflating, appreciating money. If this makes you want to force me to use your money too, then is your money really better?

This "incentive to spend and invest" is a market distortion. It leads to the "boom-bust" cycle because people are being manipulated into investing in enterprises that wouldn't otherwise be attractive enough on their own to merit investment. When these borderline enterprises eventually fail due to not enough actual resources available to see them through to completion, this causes a bust. This mechanism behind the boom-bust cycle is described very well in Thomas Woods's "Meltdown: A Free-Market Look at Why the Stock Market Collapsed, the Economy Tanked, and Government Bailouts Will Make Things Worse" in Chapter 4: "How Government Causes the Boom-Bust Business Cycle." Here is an excerpt:



Banks take this effect into account when they set mortgage interest rates. In the absence of inflation, the market-equilibrium interest rate for mortgages would be lower.

That's what this chart is showing. The blue line is the number of bitcoins in existence as of the block number shown on the bottom axis. The number of bitcoins is exactly a function of the number of blocks, and the function is asymptotic. The years shown on the top axis are approximate, based on the target block rate of one block per 10 minutes. In reality, we're somewhat ahead of schedule because the hash rate has been increasing so aggressively.

The rate of Bitcoin monetary inflation is not increasing (and never will), so it appears you are indeed missing something.

The chart shows the number of bitcoins in existence and the instantaneous rate of monetary (supply) inflation as functions of time.

No one can possibly know the answer to that question, but everyone I've talked to agrees that, in 10 years, bitcoins will either be worth nothing or a whole heck of a lot more than they're worth now.

Even in the post-scarcity United Federation of Planets, there is still a scarcity of time, which cannot simply be replicated. Joseph Sisko only serves so many meals each day and only has so many tables at Sisko's Creole Kitchen in New Orleans. If you want a reservation there, you may have to part with something dear to you in exchange for it. It may not be money — it may be your time or a product of your unique talents — but it's still trade, commerce. There is still scarcity in that world. You will never go hungry, but not everyone gets a starship.

These charts show the theoretical money supply and rate of monetary inflation if Bitcoin were exactly keeping to its schedule of one block every 10 minutes. In practice, the block generation rate has been slightly faster, so the time axis of the real functions would be slightly compressed from what is shown in these charts. Effectively this means we're already "further along" on the chart than you would expect just by looking at the time axis.

The inflation rate is the annualized rate at which new units are being added to the money supply, relative to the current size of the money supply.

For example, if the inflation rate is 10%, this means that, if the current rate of money supply creation were held constant at the present rate for an entire year, then the amount of new money created in that year would be equal to 10% of the size of the money supply at the present instant.

I created them in LibreOffice Calc.

There's no general way to differentiate between "lost" coins and coins that are simply in long-term storage, so the answer to your question is "no."

Statements are still being decided and closed. You can see a list of some recently closed statements.

However, there seems to be no response from the "feedback" email address. I have emailed about three statements that can be decided now¹, yet no action has been taken, and I have received no response.

Also, the fact that the site still charges 0.1 BTC for new statement submissions suggests that the operator has no interest in maintaining it anymore.

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1. http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=590, http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=613, http://betsofbitco.in/item?id=1137

Since there have been no changes to the bitcoin production rules, there is nothing to update on these charts.

If you're looking for a chart showing the actual number of bitcoins that have been mined over time, go here:
http://blockchain.info/charts/total-bitcoins?timespan=all

Okay, that makes sense. Thanks for the simple explanation.

I suspect that this pattern of production is on its way out anyway. The world is shifting to just-in-time manufacturing. Inventory is expensive to store and maintain. Automation and computerized supply chain management are now allowing goods to be produced as they are sold. Under this new model of production, deflation would not have a significant impact. (Hyperdeflation could still be bad, but Bitcoin probably will never experience hyperdeflation.)

I don't see the problem for the producer. Could you explain it?

Why would you want to break out? Having my savings continually gaining value doesn't sound so bad.

What creates price bubbles is not the deflationary nature of Bitcoin (which we aren't even observing yet); it's the fact that the supply is perfectly inelastic. With most commodities, when a speculative price bubble begins to form, profit motive drives production to increase, and the increasing supply counteracts the growth in price. But Bitcoin is different: no matter what the price does, the production is always at an approximately constant rate. Thus, there is no moderating effect on an increasing price, and we get speculative price bubbles. I personally believe we will continue seeing this "plateau-ramp-crash" cycle throughout Bitcoin's adoption. However, I do think it will moderate in amplitude as the market grows.

The monster machine would very quickly chew through as many as 2016 blocks (at most), at which point the difficulty would readjust, and the monster machine would be back to creating one block every ten minutes. It would barely affect the pace of bitcoin production overall.