Is the 21 million bitcoin limit unchangeable?

[MPOE-PR]

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

That quote will become extremely amusing way before two years have passed. Saving it for then.

[1715080005]

1715080005

[1715080005]

1715080005

[1715080005]

1715080005

[1715080005]

1715080005

[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?

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.

I still have some question: What kind of loss were generated by this fork and who is going to pay for it?  As stated by BTCGUILD, they lost about 250 coin during the fork, and I think there will be some merchants affected by the invalid confirmation of new chain, how much are they and who is going to compensate for them?

[johnyj]

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

Thanks for bring this up, I think this is inevitable when bitcoin gained enough business support, especially after the establishment of bitcoin foundation, now businesses have a clear target to give pressure on

If you compare with FED, it is independant of government, not even mention business

In today's software industry, the stake holder's opinion is always of high priority, and that is the reason software developers' reward can not justify their talent and amount of working. But the reason for this is that "trickle down" mechanism of today's monetary system

Now bitcoin is another monetary system, there could be totally new ways of organize things, developers could establish their own decision making mechanism, instead of following that "service minded" approach

[Peter Todd]

Gavin's quote is talking about "pressure" from the amount of transactions these businesses will put on the existing limits of the block chain. He's not talking about direct pressure from the businesses...

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

Using the chain != Petitioning the Bitcoin foundation

I believe in context "using the chain" refers to the act of using the chain for transactions directly rather than using an off-chain transaction system. Just following that quote was:

14:51   Luke-Jr   gavinandresen: are you overlooking the potential of other solutions than just growing the block size?
14:51   gmaxwell   Luke-Jr: probably a good discussion for another day.
14:51   gavinandresen   yes, time for me to take a shower and then process the 100 email messages that piled up while I was asleep
14:51   Luke-Jr   gmaxwell: well, if we're "certain" to increase the block size limit "within 2 years", I'd prefer to just discuss and schedule it now :/

If your business model relies on on-chain transactions and is threatened by high fees you have every reason to petition for change in a variety of ways, including to the foundation.

[johnyj]

Gavin's quote is talking about "pressure" from the amount of transactions these businesses will put on the existing limits of the block chain. He's not talking about direct pressure from the businesses...

Using the chain != Petitioning the Bitcoin foundation

I understand from technical point of view, the transaction function is very important, but there are other aspects more important than transaction function. Anykind of alt-coin can provide transaction function, litecoin even designed to process the transaction faster than bitcoin. Crypto currency's value is not only decided by its transaction function

Gold is not good at providing fast and large transaction, but that doesn't stop it from being the monetary base of world's bank for centuries, because it has superior consistency and stability, no one on the planet can change the character of gold, no matter how big power they have

[lleibowitz]

The 21m cap is part of the whole bitocoin idea. This should never be changed.

[batcoin]

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.  

I agree in principle and in spirit. If the cap were raised then the spirit of Bitcoin would be dead.

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.  

This is where our thoughts diverge. I don't think it's ridiculous to think that future users will be running full nodes. To an extent, I hope they do. Even with ASICs supposedly coming out to beef up hashing power 25-fold or whatever amount it's going to be - the total network is and still will be puny compared to the sum of computational hardware found in average homes where Bitcoin is currently seeing the most interest. It would be a matter of chump change to a certain number of governments or individuals to totally wreak havoc with Bitcoin as it now stands. I think we need the individual users to have a full client running on their computers at home, even if they are doing something as minor as CPU/GPU mining or whatever it might come to be. I suspect that people will be able to just pop a small ASIC into one of their computer expansion slots in the future just to do their little part for the network even at a slight loss if it means adding resilience to the network. They can have their light clients running on their Huckleberry Pi-pads to do day to day transactions.

The extent to which I hope all users will run full clients is reached when Bitcoin is so widespread that the average Joe will just accept any old update and not be bothered by it. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same amount of ignorance about BTC that we see all around us about regular old fiat. If Bitcoin should get to that level of acceptance and average users have full clients doing small (but cumulatively significant) hashes, then the time would be ripe to play on that ignorance and break Bitcoin. I would argue that the average user couldn't care less how or why Bitcoin works. They would only care that they can buy their Bud Lite with it. The USD (along with many other currencies) is a perfect example. How has that been working out?

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.

Where did I say I didn't like it or that I thought it wouldn't work out? I thought I was just discussing some points where Bitcoin could have some potential problems. Shouldn't we be discussing such things?

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 inflation is a tempting motherfucker to those that can get their hands on the money first.

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%.

Are you sure about that? As others mentioned here, raising the cap doesn't mean my savings get multiplied too. It's a trivial matter of changing a few lines of code or just like signing a magical paper document and then people's savings have instantly lost 90% of their value.

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.

This would be increasing precision, wouldn't it? You are making the bitcoins that everyone holds more divisible for smaller transactions. That can be good for everyone.

The 21m cap is part of the whole bitocoin idea. This should never be changed.

Amen, brother! Peace be with you! I absolutely agree.

[batcoin]

I also wanted to add that this looks all fine, well, and good... https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

...but so did the constitution of the USA when first written and we all see how that is turning out with the majority making (non)decisions. It all depends on the majority being knowledgeable about the reasons for certain provisions. Haven't most of the scamcoins been lacking in one or more of the principles/features that make Bitcoin great?

[MoonShadow]

I also wanted to add that this looks all fine, well, and good... https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Prohibited_changes

...but so did the constitution of the USA when first written and we all see how that is turning out with the majority making (non)decisions. It all depends on the majority being knowledgeable about the reasons for certain provisions. Haven't most of the scamcoins been lacking in one or more of the principles/features that make Bitcoin great?

Yes.

[MoonShadow]

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.  

This is where our thoughts diverge. I don't think it's ridiculous to think that future users will be running full nodes. To an extent, I hope they do. Even with ASICs supposedly coming out to beef up hashing power 25-fold or whatever amount it's going to be - the total network is and still will be puny compared to the sum of computational hardware found in average homes where Bitcoin is currently seeing the most interest. It would be a matter of chump change to a certain number of governments or individuals to totally wreak havoc with Bitcoin as it now stands.

Chump change?  Is that so?

The bitcoin network is currently running at 460.28 PetaFLOPS according to bitcoinwatch.com.  According to Wikipedia, the fastest supercomputer on Earth is Titan, A XK7 model by Cray and installed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.  It has a benchmarked sustainable rating of 17.59 PetaFLOPS and an as-installed cost of $97 million. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOP500#Top_10_ranking) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Titan_(supercomputer)

So to match wits with the Bitcoin network right now would cost at least $2.5 Billion.  And that presumes that the network doesn't grow before that monster is built!

I think we need the individual users to have a full client running on their computers at home, even if they are doing something as minor as CPU/GPU mining or whatever it might come to be. I suspect that people will be able to just pop a small ASIC into one of their computer expansion slots in the future just to do their little part for the network even at a slight loss if it means adding resilience to the network. They can have their light clients running on their Huckleberry Pi-pads to do day to day transactions.

I don't doubt that this will be possible, but full clients won't be necessary for at-home reserve miners, they just need to join a mining pool.  Pool miners don't need full clients now.

The extent to which I hope all users will run full clients is reached when Bitcoin is so widespread that the average Joe will just accept any old update and not be bothered by it. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect the same amount of ignorance about BTC that we see all around us about regular old fiat. If Bitcoin should get to that level of acceptance and average users have full clients doing small (but cumulatively significant) hashes, then the time would be ripe to play on that ignorance and break Bitcoin. I would argue that the average user couldn't care less how or why Bitcoin works. They would only care that they can buy their Bud Lite with it. The USD (along with many other currencies) is a perfect example. How has that been working out?

A similar argument was had about the Internet before it came to be.  One side believed that everyone would need to have a supercomputer to abstract the details of the network from the users, the other side thought that all users would have to educate themselves about computers and networkds to participate.  Turns out that they were both right, and the just right mix has been here all the time.  Bitcoin is so flexible as to permit that just right mix, but is rigid in the important aspects of the system.  You worry too much.

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.

Where did I say I didn't like it or that I thought it wouldn't work out? I thought I was just discussing some points where Bitcoin could have some potential problems. Shouldn't we be discussing such things?

I don't think you have any idea how often I am sucked into these kinds of re-occuring newbie conversations.  Most of the old salts have long ago chosen to ignore such repetitive "problems".  The long and short of it is, it's not a problem, you're not the first to think it is a problem, so if you insist on resolving said problem there are numerous alt-coins that should fit your sensabilities better than Bitcoin.

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 inflation is a tempting motherfucker to those that can get their hands on the money first.

And the miners don't have the final say on such things, but only miners get first access to those coins.

[porcupine87]

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

Indeed. If only the people decide, who holds bitcoin, why wouldn't they abolish the coinbase tx completly, I mean now.

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%.

Yeah, and if one person ownes 0,47% of all gold (+ earns 0,47% of the new mined gold), he ownes 0,47% of all gold. But owning gold or bitcoins makes no one rich. Spending it does!

[johnyj]

I understand from technical point of view, the transaction function is very important, but there are other aspects more important than transaction function. Anykind of alt-coin can provide transaction function, litecoin even designed to process the transaction faster than bitcoin. Crypto currency's value is not only decided by its transaction function

Gold is not good at providing fast and large transaction, but that doesn't stop it from being the monetary base of world's bank for centuries, because it has superior consistency and stability, no one on the planet can change the character of gold, no matter how big power they have

With Bitcoin there is no reason we can't have both fast and easy transactions and a store of value at the same time.

Maybe that is possible, but don't be too greedy and reqire too much at a time

Currently you can not reach that goal without a hard fork, and a hard fork as you have seen in recent event, is a very dangerous thing if not planned and handled very well

[MoonShadow]

I understand from technical point of view, the transaction function is very important, but there are other aspects more important than transaction function. Anykind of alt-coin can provide transaction function, litecoin even designed to process the transaction faster than bitcoin. Crypto currency's value is not only decided by its transaction function

Gold is not good at providing fast and large transaction, but that doesn't stop it from being the monetary base of world's bank for centuries, because it has superior consistency and stability, no one on the planet can change the character of gold, no matter how big power they have

With Bitcoin there is no reason we can't have both fast and easy transactions and a store of value at the same time.

Maybe that is possible, but don't be too greedy and reqire too much at a time

Currently you can not reach that goal without a hard fork, and a hard fork as you have seen in recent event, is a very dangerous thing if not planned and handled very well

We already have reached that goal.  No fork required, because that was part of the original design. Seriously, newbs; read a bit before talking.  Should we increase the newbie surfing term before letting you guys out of the newbie section?

And aparerntly the post count into the thousands...

[gollum]

I deeply believe that a limit to the supply of a currency is bad in the long term.

We got roughly this scenarios for a money supply:
a) Deflation or zero inflation - Encourages hording and saving, discourages investing, risking and consuming.
b) low inflation - Encourages investing (risk taking), consuming. Saving (hording) is not encourages in this scenario as the inflation adjusted return usually are lower than investment (risk taking)
c) high inflation - its okey for an economy with real growth, such as the state of bitcoin right now with growing numbers of miners, consumers and shops.
d) hyper inflation: encourages flight from the currency of high inflation to anything that is not inflated, anything such as commodities, other currencies (with normal inflation), stocks, real estate and so on..

The optimal situation for bitcoin would be a normal inflation of 5% per year when we have reached 21 million coins so that the ecosystem of bitcoin can grow based on new coins reaching the market although. Normally 2-3% would be a good inflation target but since coins (wallets) can dissapear we need more inflation to compensate for lost coins.

So I hope the bitcoin community will reach the consensus that we need inflation!

[gollum]

I deeply believe that a limit to the supply of a currency is bad in the long term.

We got roughly this scenarios for a money supply:
a) Deflation or zero inflation - Encourages hording and saving, discourages investing, risking and consuming.
b) low inflation - Encourages investing (risk taking), consuming. Saving (hording) is not encourages in this scenario as the inflation adjusted return usually are lower than investment (risk taking)
c) high inflation - its okey for an economy with real growth, such as the state of bitcoin right now with growing numbers of miners, consumers and shops.
d) hyper inflation: encourages flight from the currency of high inflation to anything that is not inflated, anything such as commodities, other currencies (with normal inflation), stocks, real estate and so on..

The optimal situation for bitcoin would be a normal inflation of 5% per year when we have reached 21 million coins so that the ecosystem of bitcoin can grow based on new coins reaching the market although. Normally 2-3% would be a good inflation target but since coins (wallets) can dissapear we need more inflation to compensate for lost coins.

So I hope the bitcoin community will reach the consensus that we need inflation!

No. Why bother with Bitcoin, go enjoy some other inflationary currency. Bitcoin is one of the few non-inflationary currencies in existence. Can people who want a non-inflationary currency have a few options for a change?

Not all of us believe that constant consumption is the key to a prosperous future. What we don't need today can be saved for tomorrow.

Perpetually inflating crypto-currencies exist. Use those. OK?

Some people call bitcoin "digital gold" but the main difference is gold never dissappears, if you lose it someone else will eventually find it so the gold supply can never get lower. The gold supply actually grows about 2% per year today because of mining. So why should bitcoin grow less than gold or even deflate?

[Stephen Gornick]

Indeed. If only the people decide, who holds bitcoin, why wouldn't they abolish the coinbase tx completly, I mean now.

Well, no miner is forced to claim the block reward subsidy.   So anyone can start reducing the amount of bitcoins (and thus increasing the value of existing bitcoins) by mining (solo) but not claiming the subsidy.

Now if you are suggesting to change the protocol so that starting with the next block (or at some point in the future) there is no more block reward subsidy, you can try that right now.  You just change one line of code and release your hard-fork variant of the Bitcoin-Qt/bitcoind client and start a campaign to get the economic majority to switch to using it.

Users aren't stupid though -- they know that fees are insufficient currently to incent enough miners to protect the network.    So adopting your fork would be crypto-currency suicide.        So the limit stays at 25 BTC per block, until block 420,000 and then 12.5 BTC per block, until block 630,000 and then 6.25 per block, etc.  

Now let's say it is year 2024 and fees alone are seen as being way more than sufficient enough to support the level of hashing necessary to protect the network, so the fear of the loss of subsidy impacting hashing capacity is not a limiting factor.   However, people who hold bitcoins include people who have lent their coins out to those who have borrowed bitcoins and need to repay loans (denominated in bitcoins).    

Presumably anyone borrowing bitcoins would require a clause in the loan agreement that if the subsidy were to be reduced (change in the money supply were to occur) that their principal and/or interest would be adjusted appropriately.   If the subsidy is discontinued there would be little gain for those who have lent out their coins.  And who lends bitcoins?   The economic majority, that's who.  So it is not in the best interest of any of the economic majority to change the rules as far as the rate of Bitcoin issuance -- towards either direction up or down.

[Edited: for clarity and readability]

[markm]

Indeed. If only the people decide, who holds bitcoin, why wouldn't they abolish the coinbase tx completly, I mean now.

Well,

Haha nice usage of a rhetorical question as a springboard!

Presumably anyone borrowing bitcoins would require a clause in the loan agreement that if the subsidy were to be reduced (change in the money supply were to occur) that their principal and/or interest would be adjusted appropriately.   If the subsidy is discontinued there would be little gain for those who have lent out their coins.  And who lends bitcoins?   The economic majority, that's who.  So it is not in the best interest of any of the economic majority to change the rules as far as the rate of Bitcoin issuance -- in either direct direction.

Maybe a legal definition of bitcoin would be useful afterall then, so that reduction of originally specified subsidy is off the table, saving gosh knows how many paragraphs on each and every loan contract throughout the next 136 or 140 or whatever it is years?

(I doubt a scheduled per original schedule reduction would grant a debtor relief, would it?)

-MarkM-

[Timo Y]

I deeply believe that a limit to the supply of a currency is bad in the long term.

We got roughly this scenarios for a money supply:
a) Deflation or zero inflation - Encourages hording and saving, discourages investing, risking and consuming.
b) low inflation - Encourages investing (risk taking), consuming. Saving (hording) is not encourages in this scenario as the inflation adjusted return usually are lower than investment (risk taking)
c) high inflation - its okey for an economy with real growth, such as the state of bitcoin right now with growing numbers of miners, consumers and shops.
d) hyper inflation: encourages flight from the currency of high inflation to anything that is not inflated, anything such as commodities, other currencies (with normal inflation), stocks, real estate and so on..

The optimal situation for bitcoin would be a normal inflation of 5% per year when we have reached 21 million coins so that the ecosystem of bitcoin can grow based on new coins reaching the market although. Normally 2-3% would be a good inflation target but since coins (wallets) can dissapear we need more inflation to compensate for lost coins.

So I hope the bitcoin community will reach the consensus that we need inflation!

We don't want to encourage "investing,risking, and consuming" for their own sake.
We don't want to discourage "hording and saving" for their own sake.

We want to encourage productivity.

For optimum productivity you need a balance of BOTH saving and investing/consuming. Artificial inflation distorts that balance towards malinvestment, taking stupid risks, and wasteful consumption.

[markm]

Artificial inflation distorts that balance towards malinvestment, taking stupid risks, and wasteful consumption.

There are plenty of altcoins for doing those things with.

-MarkM-

[commonancestor]

How easy / hard would it be to change this limit? It seems, this function controls how many coins are given to miners for solving a block. If developers decided to change this function, the 21 million number would change too, right? Or is the 21 million number somehow coded deeper in the system?

If there is a block containing larger-than-standard reward, it is rejected by standard nodes. If there are some non-standard nodes who accept it, then they effectively create a blockchain fork, and onwards they are on their own.

Or a different point of view, it would take a hard fork with all it takes.