Is the 21 million bitcoin limit unchangeable?

[markm]

It's theoretically possible, yes.  It's also theoretically possible for the quantum force we call gravity to reverse itself tommorrow, and we are all 'reborn' in the result, that some scientist calls "The big fart" in another 14 trillion years.

I'd give those two about even odds.

Do u give those even odds or u wish those have even odds?
(Don't bother answering this question)

It could, mayhap, be a rhetorical device intended to recall to mind some class of items that some demographics, whilst their hands remain warm, might upon occasion be found to have in their hands. Reminds me of a Bugs Bunny utterance along the lines of "Of course you realise, this means something."

-MarkM-

[Killdozer]

No need for arguing really, this has a really easy answer:
The actual number of bitcoins doesn't matter. They are practically infinitely indivisible, and their price varies according to adoption and the size of the available market. Why would you ever need to change their number? It could have been 1, 10, 1000, or 1e56, it's just a matter of scale and price calculation for merchants.

[batcoin]

Bitcoin is mathematical, and mathematics is elegant, so obviously it cannot happen here.

Man, those sound like famous last words...

Oh I'm sorry, was the sound turned down or did the sound effects department not adequately convey the sound of irony dripping copiously from said words?



-MarkM-

EDIT: Hint: "can't happen here" aka "it cannot happen here" is a proverbially famous famously proverbial "these are last words, epitaph writers please take note of them" indicator.

(As in "The proverbial 'it cannot happen here'" )

(Yet somehow, strangely, weirdly, mathematically, not to be confused with "hash collision"... Hmm, as in things that make one go hmmm..)

Yeah, sorry, I am deaf, so I didn't hear it. Text kinda comes across that way too for the most part. Oh well. lol

[MoonShadow]

If you don't think Bitcoin is safe, don't invest anything into it.  That limit is unchangable, though, not because of the code, but because of the principle.  If there were to ever be a hard code fork on this issue, one would be the true Bitcoin, the other could not be.  It's also more than a bit rediculous to assume that future users would be running a full node, and could be tricked into supporting such a change simply by turning on an auto update feature.  First off, the vast majority of future bitcoin users, if bitcoin is ever truely succesful, will be running light clients or depending upon wallet service accounts; the full client will be the realtively rare animal.  Probably as many or more full nodes as presently exist, but still realtively rare overall.  Second, a group of end users, both stupid enough to trust their internal security with their money to a remotely controlled automated system AND wealthy enough to ignore the ongoing costs of running a full node would still amount to little, IMHO simply because there are now, and shall be, more than just the main reference client.  So whatever percentage is deceived into supporting the change will still be opposed (by default) by those nodes that do not authorize or otherwise cannot participate in an auto update.  Furthermore, the break wouldn't go unnoticed for very long, and a great many of the decieved users can and will revert.  The 21M limit is part of what makes Bitcoin what it is, if you don't like it or don't think it's going to work out, you can either support one of the alt-coins that suits your needs or start your own.  Just don't call it Bitcoin.

[markm]

Man, those sound like famous last words...

[...SNIP...]

Yeah, sorry, I am deaf, so I didn't hear it. Text kinda comes across that way too for the most part. Oh well. lol

Oh don't be so modest, you clearly did hear what it sounded like, which was how it was meant to sound. Thanks for acting as a foil to increase the volume a little for the studio audience and/or the folks at home.

-MarkM-

[johnyj]

OP's question is a very natural response to the latest incident, I think many people would sooner or later start to worry about a few core devs and a few mining pools push a new version and create a fork and claim that fork is the right choice

But there are limitations:
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

So far, the most popular word is "consensus"
"Those proposing changes should consider that ultimately consent may rest with the consensus of the Bitcoin users"
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Bitcoin_Improvement_Proposals

And there are some prohibited changes
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

Consensus is a very vague term, how many people can reach a consensus? 79% or 81%? It is always necessary to discuss the political (decision making) structure of bitcoin, but as it appeared this time, there is an internal decision making process by core devs and a couple of pool operators, works like FOMC meeting. Bitcoin users in this case do not have any choice but follow the core devs' directive, so "consensus" might be just some claim that do not have practical meaning

So follow the FED or follow the core devs, that's the question. Maybe FED is not better than core devs, but core devs must show some expertise when it comes to handling users trust. At least this time they acted professionaly and hold the consistency and integrity of bitcoin, thus gained some reputation, but anyway this showed some uncertainties of bitcoin which has never been revealed before, I think people need time to digest all these, time will tell

[markm]

Yeah maybe they did allow themselves to be stampeded by the ignorant masses into releasing too early?

Then again there seem to have also been rumours that "big business[es]" also are applying pressure.

-MarkM-

[johnyj]

Yeah maybe they did allow themselves to be stampeded by the ignorant masses into releasing too early?

Then again there seem to have also been runours that "big business[es]" also are applying pressure.

-MarkM-

I heard that gox are running 0.7?

Big businesses are just representations of bitcoin users, so they do listen to users

[Stephen Gornick]

So it kind of seems like really the economic power is in those who want to hold bitcoins, a[...] rather than in those who already hold them...

Glad I'm not the only one to think that theory needs revision.

I raised a question on StackExchange on that:

Is Bitcoin's Economic Majority those who already own coins or those who will buy or keep coins?
 - http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/8285/153'

I also added that to the Wiki article's discussion page:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Talk:Economic_majority

[MoonShadow]

Yeah maybe they did allow themselves to be stampeded by the ignorant masses into releasing too early?

Then again there seem to have also been runours that "big business[es]" also are applying pressure.

-MarkM-

I heard that gox are running 0.7?

That's possible, but likely irrelevent.  MtGox doesn't mine, and if they refuse to forward an oversized block they alone are not significant enough to prevent the propagation of the block.  The only downside is to users of MtGox who might not be able to trade until they fix their stuff.

[Stephen Gornick]

Assume the 0.8 miners had 70% of the hashing power and most of the merchants wanted 0.8.  Also suppose 30% of the nodes are 0.8 and 70% are 0.7 or below because most people don't fully understand what is going on and didn't upgrade yet.  How would this play out?

In the short term (hours after fork begins) it plays out poorly.     Most larger merchants and exchanges would halt processing until there was a pretty good idea of which side already had support of the economic majority or which side was more favorable to the economic majority and let that determine which side to support.  Smaller merchants not using a payment processor would see the alert and hopefully halt processing as well, but if not it probably shouldn't be too bad as customers could still be able to spend -- their transactions get mined on chains on both sides.  Merchants taking payments who are on the "wrong" side will start getting confirmations for payments that didn't yet get a confirm on the other side.

So then once this economic majority concludes that they are sticking with 0.7, miners using the pools that are mining on the 0.8 side have to wonder how those pools are going to pay out if their revenues will no longer be spendable (as those merchants and exchanges won't acknowledge blocks from the v0.8 side), and thus miner proceeds have no value.

So as a result you have individual miners start defecting to pools that are on the v0.7 side.  And hours later this problem no longer exists, because the pools that thought they could force a switch to v0.8 no longer have the hashing power to do so, and their side eventually no longer remains the longest chain.  

In this instance, eventually the chains converge and any blocks generated on the v0.8 side get orphaned.  

And as a result the pools come to realize who wears the pants in this relationship.  It is the economic majority -- the people who will buy their production of coins.

[markm]

Of course that assumes that the economic majority do want to backtrack to and/or stay with 0.7. If they did not, then maybe the rumours that [users or entities that economically serve as proxies for users] were pressuring for larger block sizes (that is to say, for versions 0.8 and up) might have been exaggerated.

I seem to recall someone suggesting Gavin was under pressure from big businesses to get larger blocks into play, other than that maybe there just happen to be a whole bunch of what maybe amount in this issue to "forum trolls" (said with some affection and tongue in cheek) loudly pushing for something the actual economic majority does not actually consider more important than first ensuring we can even actually in real life use the max block size we already had specified in capital letters in the source code.



As it happened though, one thing we did accomplish was a real life test of whether the max block size already specified was in fact workable yet.

-MarkM-

EDIT: No paradox need be involved; users might have clamoured too loud for quick action that, upon seeing its results, they quickly decided they would prefer to roll back.

[Come-from-Beyond]

No need for arguing really, this has a really easy answer:
The actual number of bitcoins doesn't matter. They are practically infinitely indivisible, and their price varies according to adoption and the size of the available market. Why would you ever need to change their number? It could have been 1, 10, 1000, or 1e56, it's just a matter of scale and price calculation for merchants.

Because if u cut a pie into 2 pieces u still have one pie, not two.

[Come-from-Beyond]

But that's obviously not the case.

You might wish to read up on the concept with Bitcoin known as the Economic Majority:
 - http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority

The article at http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority is very arguable.

[Economic majority is] the theory that the power to control the bitcoin protocol is held by those who hold bitcoins.

Without axioms a theory is just a hypothesis. The author comes to a conclusion (theorem) but a theorem can't be proved nor disproved without axioms.

[Peter Todd]

Of course that assumes that the economic majority do want to backtrack to and/or stay with 0.7. If they did not, then maybe the rumours that [users or entities that economically serve as proxies for users] were pressuring for larger block sizes (that is to say, for versions 0.8 and up) might have been exaggerated.

I seem to recall someone suggesting Gavin was under pressure from big businesses to get larger blocks into play, other than that maybe there just happen to be a whole bunch of what maybe amount in this issue to "forum trolls" (said with some affection and tongue in cheek) loudly pushing for something the actual economic majority does not actually consider more important than first ensuring we can even actually in real life use the max block size we already had specified in capital letters in the source code.

Relevant IRC:

14:49   gavinandresen   Luke-Jr: argument for another day, but I can almost guarantee that the blocksize limit will be raised in less than 2 years, just based on pressure from the big businesses using the chain (and no, NOT satoshidice)
14:50   gmaxwell   gavinandresen: If pressure from startups with business plans come in conflict with the health of the system then thats an issue we'll have to resolve.
14:50   gavinandresen   gmaxwell: not startups with business plans, existing companies like BItPay and Coinbase that are seeing exponential growth

http://bitcoinstats.com/irc/bitcoin-dev/logs/2013/03/12#l6304349

[maxmint]

No need for arguing really, this has a really easy answer:
The actual number of bitcoins doesn't matter. They are practically infinitely indivisible, and their price varies according to adoption and the size of the available market. Why would you ever need to change their number? It could have been 1, 10, 1000, or 1e56, it's just a matter of scale and price calculation for merchants.

The number of bitcoins does in fact matter for some of the predictions currently floating around. Take this statement for example:
The target value for bitcoin is 100.000 to 1.000.000 (Source)

This is based on 2 assumptions:
1. Bitcoin someday will grab a 1% to 10% market share on the transactional currency market (600 billion to 6 trillion USD)
2. This market share will be fulfilled by 6 million bitcoins (around one in four bitcoins of the 21 million is actually used in transactions, the rest are in savings or investment plans)

Now if the 21 million limit changes, the outcome of the prediction changes too. Think of it this way: if you own 100,000 bitcoins and you know there won't ever be more than 21 million bitcoins, then you currently own 0.47% of the whole "bitcoin pie". Now if the upper limit changes to 210 million (thus the pie getting bigger), then your share of the pie suddenly shrinks to 0.047%.

It seems if the upper limit in fact is changeable, then the above prediction is not really useful.

[Come-from-Beyond]

Think of it this way: if you own 100,000 bitcoins and you know there won't ever be more than 21 million bitcoins, then you currently own 0.47% of the whole "bitcoin pie". Now if the upper limit changes to 210 million (thus the pie getting bigger), then your share of the pie suddenly shrinks to 0.047%.

If 21 million cap is multiplied by 10, then all savings are multiplied by 10 as well. So 100,000 bitcoins will become 1,000,000. It's still 0.47%.

[markm]

Ah so that is where you are tripping up.

The "over me and my army's cold dead bodies" change in total number of coins involves actually issuing moar coins, not merely moving the decimal point aka multiplying all existing values by a constant.

-MarkM-

[maxmint]

Think of it this way: if you own 100,000 bitcoins and you know there won't ever be more than 21 million bitcoins, then you currently own 0.47% of the whole "bitcoin pie". Now if the upper limit changes to 210 million (thus the pie getting bigger), then your share of the pie suddenly shrinks to 0.047%.

If 21 million cap is multiplied by 10, then all savings are multiplied by 10 as well. So 100,000 bitcoins will become 1,000,000. It's still 0.47%.

I disagree. As I understand this, the cap is the sum of a (geometric) series, adding up all the bitcoins generated per block over time.
So you can't change the upper limit directly, but you could change the number of bitcoins generated per block and / or the reduction rate (which currently is at a 50% reduction every 4 years).
When changing one of these two, the projected upper limit changes, but the number of bitcoins in my savings stay the same. I don't see any reason why the number of my bitcoins should be affected by this.

[Come-from-Beyond]

For me increasing 21m cap is the same as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_split. Sorry if u were talking about some other thing.