Bitcoin Executive Says 21 Million Cap Increase Inevitable

[MicroGuy]

For those of you that don’t eat, breathe, and sleep cryptocurrency, you might not have been aware that Bitcoin was (until today) thought to have a hard cap on the total number of coins that could be generated.

According to the official Bitcoin Wiki, Satoshi’s original plan called for the last Bitcoin to be mined around the year 2140, which would stop production at just under 21,000,00 bitcoins.

The last block that will generate coins will be block #6,929,999 which should be generated at or near the year 2140. The total number of coins in circulation will then remain static at 20,999,999.9769 BTC.

But according to a tweet today by former Bitcoin Foundation Director, Jon Matonis, it’s not a matter of “if” an increase will occur – but “when”.

The main question that arises when pondering this “inevitable” change is, “how will increasing the total supply affect the Bitcoin price?” One could speculate that increasing the cap to 42,000,000 for example would cut the BTC price in half.

Full Story: http://altcoinpress.com/2015/06/bitcoin-executive-says-21-million-cap-increase-inevitable/

[Warren Buffet]

Jon Matonis is not saying that we should increase the 21M cap. He's saying that at some point in the future, someone will try and increase it. As many have pointed out - if this ever happens successfully, the value of bitcoin will be significantly destroyed. Jon Matonis is an early adopter and holds a large % of his wealth in bitcoin, so he is obviously opposed to increasing the size. Please understand the context of his words before making a premature judgement on what he means.

[MicroGuy]

Jon Matonis is not saying that we should increase the 21M cap. He's saying that at some point in the future, someone will try and increase it. As many have pointed out - if this ever happens successfully, the value of bitcoin will be significantly destroyed. Jon Matonis is an early adopter and holds a large % of his wealth in bitcoin, so he is obviously opposed to increasing the size. Please understand the context of his words before making a premature judgement on what he means.

Read through all of his tweets from today ...

I could easily see sizeable majority wanting higher block rewards, especially newcomers. Welfare recipients >50%.

https://twitter.com/jonmatonis/status/611844197331693568

[Lauda]

Interesting. Anyone who proposes this is out of their mind. We've already argued in the past the there are enough coins because they can be divide.
If the supply ever changes even to 22 Million, we could almost safely say that Bitcoin would die afterwards. I'm not sure how other holders feel but if this ever happens I'm jumping ship and never coming back (I think that this is one of the rare scenarios in which I would do that).

[MicroGuy]

Here's another article on the matter for those interested:

https://www.cryptocoinsnews.com/jon-matonis-believes-increased-bitcoin-block-size-will-lead-increased-mining-reward/

[coins101]

Someone should really think about inventing a calculator or some other method for division of units.

Seriously, only governments taking control would think about doing such stupid things.

[Johny Depp]

This thread is misrepresenting the Truth

Be Careful

[MicroGuy]

This thread is misrepresenting the Truth

Be Careful

This is what John Matonis said, "Block size hard fork debate is instructive because it's precursor to inevitable fork revising block reward that increases 21m cap."

I don't see the point in pretending he didn't say something he said.

[jonald_fyookball]

At the end of the article, it asks "Do you think Jon Matonis has flipped his wig?"

I say: ABSOLUTELY.  
 
The blocksize increase is necessary to deal
with bandwidth RIGHT NOW.

There's absolutely no reason to increase the monetary supply,
at least not for a very very long time, if EVER.

Conceivably in the future, it could be determined that a pure
deflationary currency has problems, but Bitcoin would have to be
mighty huge to uncover that truth.

If anyone tried to force such a change without very good reason,
i'm almost 100% sure Bitcoin would fork.  I know which fork I
would support.

[futureofbitcoin]

I think it might even be crucial for bitcoin to increase the cap. psychology of having 0.000000000000001 of a coin aside, there's a very real problem with compensation for miners. Will there really be enough transaction volume to cover mining expenses? By the time the mining rewards become insignificant, the infrastructure around bitcoin will probably be a lot better, and there will be companies like coinbase and xapo that will have bitcoin transactions within its own environment and off chain, to allow micro transactions (so that a 1000 satoshi payment won't require 10000 satoshi transaction fees for example) and to simply save on transaction fees. We don't know how many transactions will actually be done on the blockchain.


If the miner rewards are too low at that time, the bitcoin network will not have enough security and there will inevitably be people who want to destroy it given the chance.

[tokeweed]

This thread is misrepresenting the Truth

Be Careful

This is what John Matonis said, "Block size hard fork debate is instructive because it's precursor to inevitable fork revising block reward that increases 21m cap."

I don't see the point in pretending he didn't say something he said.

He was being sarcastic...?  Is Jon Matonis against the hard fork?  If he is, he's trying to say Gavin's move is a precursor to a shit storm coming in BTC land.

If XT succeeds, increasing the 21m cap would not seem farfetched.  At least in his eyes.

[jaberwock]

I don't think that the miners that mined coins with 21M cap would be happy if the maximum number of coins increases(if I was a miner I would not be happy)

And Bitcoin barely can hold the price above the 200 level, if the block reward don't get halved we are going nowhere but down. Increase the maximum number of Bitcoins would be bad right now, even without considering the other effects that would affect the price

[BLKBITZ]

the price will collapse as people realize bitcoin is just like fiat.

[aso118]

The 21 Mn cap on bitcoins is what attracted a lot of libertarians to Bitcoin.
I, for one, would be disappointed if this does happen.
Very soon, you could have governments saying that they should decide the cap on number of bitcoins.

[achow101]

How, exactly, would such a change roll out? There is actually no point in the code (that I could find) that specifically imposes such a cap. The only thing that this cap comes from is the method which the block reward comes from, simply dividing by two. There is a point where the rounding used in the code simply returned zero, and that was when the block reward went to zero. This just so happens to be just under 21 million Bitcoin, which is likely just a coincidence, not a specifically hard coded thing.

[dunand]

You all understand that the OP is invested in an alt coin and is a gold bug. This is simple FUD.

[jonald_fyookball]

You all understand that the OP is invested in an alt coin and is a gold bug. This is simple FUD.

thought so.  knew there had to be a simple explanation.

[chennan]

I think it might even be crucial for bitcoin to increase the cap. psychology of having 0.000000000000001 of a coin aside, there's a very real problem with compensation for miners. Will there really be enough transaction volume to cover mining expenses? By the time the mining rewards become insignificant, the infrastructure around bitcoin will probably be a lot better, and there will be companies like coinbase and xapo that will have bitcoin transactions within its own environment and off chain, to allow micro transactions (so that a 1000 satoshi payment won't require 10000 satoshi transaction fees for example) and to simply save on transaction fees. We don't know how many transactions will actually be done on the blockchain.


If the miner rewards are too low at that time, the bitcoin network will not have enough security and there will inevitably be people who want to destroy it given the chance.

It will depend on some factors such as mining reward, bitcoin price, hashing power, bitcoin adoption etc before the end of bitcoin mining. No one knows it yet! But IMO it is a crazy ideal, which definitely will crash the price. One day bitcoin is popular and the number of it in the circulation cant meet the reqirement of our need, and it falls in to deep deflation. We might need to increase the 21m cap. But who knows now?

[tvbcof]

The idea of users paying anything but the most trivial of fees for the (fairly amazing) service seems like garlic to a vampire to an interesting set of the 'thought leaders' in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

Alternative sources of infrastructure funding would be to have permanent inflation which seems to be what Matonis is alluding to and is wildly popular in mainstream monetary systems these days, or to have costs subsidized in exchange for user exploitation much like certain industry players do with e-mail, cloud storage, etc.

Pick your poison.  Actually, never mind.  Various others have a plan for you.

[Quickseller]

This thread is misrepresenting the Truth

Be Careful

the source of the article is altcoinpress.com. While I am not familiar with this news service, I think their domain should be a pretty good indicator of their ability to be fair and balanced to Bitcoin. (Note that I have pretty much zero interest in reading the article nor did I)

In others words, there is nothing to see here and you can move along.