21 millions bitcoin in question

[Denker]

I do not think this is possible. Because of the halving that happens every about 4 years, the price of Bitcoin will have to rise for it to be sustained amd to continue existing. I do not think we'll ever reach 21 million - it's going to become harder and harder to get mined every time.

There will never be a number of 21 million in existence because hundreds of thousands of coins, if not millions got lost.Especially in the early days when Bitcoin was worth nothing.
But even that is imo no reason why there should be an increase of the coin amount limit happening.
If we need to do something then add one or two more decimals. But trying to change the limit is ridiculous.Scarcity is one of Bitcoin's most important features.
And if we start to change this once there will be attempts to repeat this again and again and there won't be no difference to fiat and QE anymore.
No no and again no!!!!!

[pawel7777]

...

day 1.

fruitjuice seller: "orange juice barrels only $700 for 1000litres"
fruitjuice seller: "i have 21 million barrels to sell before i retire. hurry hurry hurry"
customerA: "great i can pour out 1000 litres to 1000 friends"
customerA: "ill buy one and comeback every day for another barrel for the next 3 years because each friend needs a litre a day"
fruitjuice seller: "great, see you tomorrow"

day 2.

fruitjuice seller: "orange juice barrels only $700 for 1000000litres, except what I call "litre" is now a unit x1000 smaller than yesterday's "litre" and has x1000 less nutritious value
fruitjuice seller: "i have <21 million barrels to sell before i retire. hurry hurry hurry"[/color]
customerA: "great i can pour out 1000,000 litres to 1000 friends and have enough for 3 years1 day"
customerA: "ill buy one and see you in three yearstomorrow"
fruitjuice seller: "wait, what..so i only sell you one barrel in 3 years instead of 1 barrel a day for three years.. nothing changed..."
fruitjuice seller: "dang i better lower my price per barrel or be stuck with not selling as many"

...

FTFY

[franky1]

...

FTFY

nope... the unit of measure has moved from X to xxxx
they would just resized the barrels. to keep an artificial human visual accounting limit of 21 million barrels. yet each barrel contains more litres.

EG
lets break it down into binary


1 sat is 00000001
you cannot go any lower!!

1btc is 101111101011110000100000000

however adding more units does not mean that 1btc stays the same
for instance, lets say.. going to millisats.

1btc - 101111101011110000100000000
becomes
1btc - 1011101001000011101101110100000000000

do you notice that although there are only 21m btc.. not just the unit of measure has changed but it also affects how
it is stored on your computer.

in short anyone holding a value of 1BTC now. would be only holding 0.0001btc if a change happened. because the immutable blockchain has the value LOCKED as:
101111101011110000100000000
which cannot suddenly be magically changed to
1011101001000011101101110100000000000
to ensure you still have the new "1btc"

the bait and switch however would be hidden in code.
it would also require people to redownload and resync the entire blockchain to store 1btc as
1011101001000011101101110100000000000
instead of
101111101011110000100000000

its not a case of having an orange and instead of selling a whole orange, your selling segments of oranges at a fraction of the price
its having a basket of oranges that you just call an orange. an then the individual (old) oranges you then call segments.

which means if you do the maths and look at the code. farmers have to farm for longer. but on the fruit stall sign you have stated there are still 21 million oranges (new baskets) but your fruitstall is more crammed (more bytes of data, more units of measure)

i understand the greed mentality of "yes i can buy one bitcoin (basket of oranges) and it will feed more people(more units of measure). the issue is that 1btc (basket) will drop in price due to supply and demand

[pawel7777]

...

FTFY

nope... the unit of measure has moved from X to xxxx
they would just resized the barrels. to keep an artificial human visual accounting limit of 21 million barrels. yet each barrel contains more litres.
...

My "FTFY" is correct assuming BTC purchasing power = OJ's nutritious value.

You won't increase market cap by x1000 by introducing millisatoshis.

I do understand where you're coming from and you're not wrong saying that it's essentially creating x1000 more bitcoins and changing definition of what "bitcoin" is, but that would have zero effect on the price, other than maybe caused by psychological discomfort and few bad press hits (I. Kaminska from FT would be all over it).

It's definitely not the same as i.e. changing 21m cap to 100m etc. It's essentially the same as dividing shares of a company, i.e. from 10 to 10,000, it won't have any effect on % holding of each shareholder and will have no effect on the value of share capital. So what's the issue?

[salmanahmedone]

Any alteration to the 21 million coin will completely destroyed the work of Satoshi, the price and erode the community trust in Bitcoin, it is not compulsory to be involved with Bitcoin, you can use other tokens that are with high inflation,  also the miners have been taken care of with the inclusion of transaction fee

I think what he is trying to say is, if there are more Bitcoin to be mined when the Cap is raised, then miners will be able to mine more coins and this would be the incentive to increase it for them. Even if they raised that limit, then the interval will have to be adjusted to, for miners to benefit now.

The problem is, the supply increase will reduce it's value and this will cancel out any benefit that might be gained by more coins that can be mined now. Normal Bitcoin users will suffer the most, because it devalue their money, so they will start dumping their coins, and the price will even go lower.

I don't think The devs and bitcoin foundation will allow this to happen. If bitcoin is produced without a limit it would cause a massive fall in it's value and eventually the miners will have a hard time trying to recover their investment

[fred21]

There will never be a number of 21 million in existence because hundreds of thousands of coins, if not millions got lost.Especially in the early days when Bitcoin was worth nothing.
But even that is imo no reason why there should be an increase of the coin amount limit happening.
If we need to do something then add one or two more decimals. But trying to change the limit is ridiculous.Scarcity is one of Bitcoin's most important features.
And if we start to change this once there will be attempts to repeat this again and again and there won't be no difference to fiat and QE anymore.
No no and again no!!!!!

You said no. I am with you.

But who is deciding to make the limit of 21 millions  bitcoin go up? this are the node runners, the people who runs the instance of the bitcoin software.

The question is what would make them decide to hard fork and to raise the limit?

Those people are (for the most of them) miners. So they own bitcoins and get revenues from the mining.

It is strange because the people who mine have the power to great more of the thing they are actually mining. This was not the case in the 19th century for gold miners!!!!
- 

[arcanaaerobics]

The coins number is a weird point.. We already have 16kk in circulation, rest only 5kk to mine.. I don't think it's "fair" however a change in this numbers isn't the answer, maybe bitcoin will give their place to another alt in the future, lets see what the future have for us.

[fred21]

Do the people that are running the nodes also mine?

[TomPlatz]

Id say that when we get anywhere near 21 million coins that there will be so many transactions and funds from major adoption that nobody will care risking the outcome of increasing the ceiling.

[salmanahmedone]

Any alteration to the 21 million coin will completely destroyed the work of Satoshi, the price and erode the community trust in Bitcoin, it is not compulsory to be involved with Bitcoin, you can use other tokens that are with high inflation,  also the miners have been taken care of with the inclusion of transaction fee

I think what he is trying to say is, if there are more Bitcoin to be mined when the Cap is raised, then miners will be able to mine more coins and this would be the incentive to increase it for them. Even if they raised that limit, then the interval will have to be adjusted to, for miners to benefit now.

The problem is, the supply increase will reduce it's value and this will cancel out any benefit that might be gained by more coins that can be mined now. Normal Bitcoin users will suffer the most, because it devalue their money, so they will start dumping their coins, and the price will even go lower.

And also to cover the cost of mining. Why would they do that?
Even if there is a fork, that forked chain would not survive too long.

[deisik]

Hello,

Hard fork will make possible to extend the number of bitcoin in circulation (more than 21 millions).

However, everyone told me that the majority of node runners will not allow this to happen.

My question is why they will not?

Indeed, this will create more revenu for them, as there will be more bitcoin to mine and not only revenu from transaction fees.

What makes you think that it will create more revenue for miners? Even if we assume that such change can be forced (while it can't), this will cause many early adopters sell out their stashes. That would send price vertically down and lead to miners profits turning into losses due to their high mining costs at the current difficulty, even if their revenue increases in bitcoins. But losses are losses no matter how you look at them...

As you can see, miners won't be shooting themselves in the foot

[South Park]

Hello,

Hard fork will make possible to extend the number of bitcoin in circulation (more than 21 millions).

However, everyone told me that the majority of node runners will not allow this to happen.

My question is why they will not?

Indeed, this will create more revenu for them, as there will be more bitcoin to mine and not only revenu from transaction fees.

what do you think?

This is a very dumb example but lets use it for the sake of simplicity, if there was only one painting of Picasso that painting will be worth X amount of money, if a second copy was found then the two paintings will be worth X/2 and that is the best case scenario, probably will be less than that, so its very easy to see that the bigger the supply of something the lower the value of that object.

[Kevin77]

Hello,

Hard fork will make possible to extend the number of bitcoin in circulation (more than 21 millions).

However, everyone told me that the majority of node runners will not allow this to happen.

My question is why they will not?

Indeed, this will create more revenu for them, as there will be more bitcoin to mine and not only revenu from transaction fees.

what do you think?

This is a very dumb example but lets use it for the sake of simplicity, if there was only one painting of Picasso that painting will be worth X amount of money, if a second copy was found then the two paintings will be worth X/2 and that is the best case scenario, probably will be less than that, so its very easy to see that the bigger the supply of something the lower the value of that object.

Well by that same example we could assume that it might worth a lot more then 2/x  , it is still a picasso painting . So if it worths X amount maybe it will be 0.75X amount and the total would be 1.5X instead of just X .
I believe bitcoins worthy might not drop a lot and still have a lot more bitcoins to go around.

[olushakes]

One of those thing that does not make money lose value is artificial scarcity the same question you should ask why governments cannot just print money to meet its need because it does not just work that way. The same with Bitcoin, if the volume is unnecessarily large then I see its value being eroded away easily and the developer would have foresaw this to have recommended a cap of 21million because that would be the best maximum for the coin.

[deisik]

This is a very dumb example but lets use it for the sake of simplicity, if there was only one painting of Picasso that painting will be worth X amount of money, if a second copy was found then the two paintings will be worth X/2 and that is the best case scenario, probably will be less than that, so its very easy to see that the bigger the supply of something the lower the value of that object.

Well by that same example we could assume that it might worth a lot more then 2/x  , it is still a picasso painting . So if it worths X amount maybe it will be 0.75X amount and the total would be 1.5X instead of just X .
I believe bitcoins worthy might not drop a lot and still have a lot more bitcoins to go around.

Picassos are not your bitcoins

Every picasso painting is unique by definition, while bitcoins are made fungible on purpose. So two bitcoins will always cost 2x1 BTC. On the other hand, two picasso paintings must cost significantly higher that 2x1 Picasso, even if they share the same view (or thanks to that). How come? Because having a picasso painting in your billiard room is cool, but having two somewhat identical picasso paintings would be just awesome

[mastica]

Changing the supply of bitcoin, will make the early adopters big and small holders to drop their coins, this will make bitcoin crash into something near like 200 dollars if not lowe, the miners at this value wont be able to profit, soo it could kill bitcoin.
 Sure some people had been losted on the last years, but those should make the demand and supply work, and people give more value to their coins.

[larryfromjapan]

Trust in bitcoin would immediately collapse along with the price. Because if they change it once, what is to say that they wont do it again. Besides it would serve no useful purpose.

[xuan87]

I think adding the amount of bitcoin will cause so many bad impact, the biggest impact is the price when the amount is added, automatically it will decrease the value, and because bitcoin is decentralized where the price is based on supply and demand, adding an amount going to add the number of supply, so it will makes the price go down, and then it will be a bad scenario for trader, because if the amount added is too much it will need a lot of time for the price to bounce back

[mrcash02]

I think adding the amount of bitcoin will cause so many bad impact, the biggest impact is the price when the amount is added, automatically it will decrease the value, and because bitcoin is decentralized where the price is based on supply and demand, adding an amount going to add the number of supply, so it will makes the price go down, and then it will be a bad scenario for trader, because if the amount added is too much it will need a lot of time for the price to bounce back

The Bitcoin system was already created thinking about this issue. They set 21 millions max Bitcoins, because it's a good amount to make the currency worth on long term. If everythings goes as planned, Bitcoin will rise even more, and more people will start using it, making the demand be higher or equal the offer. This is a perfect cycle to let the coin pricing a lot!

No chance to add more than 21 millions Bitcoins in the world... And I don't know someone would like this happen.

[QuestionAuthority]

There will never be 21m bitcoins in circulation because some have already been burned and permanently lost (losing a hardrive with all those bitcoins had to suck).

It's believed that the great and beloved Satoshi lord of all things Bitcoin premined a million coins. If he's dead those coins could be permanently lost which means there will never be more than somewhere less than 20m Bitcoins. If Satoshi is actually a team at the NSA then they will re-enter circulation when the US Gov decides to crash the price of Bitcoin down to nothing.

Of course, there will be more lost and burned in the future but it doesn't really matter because Bitcoin is divisible down to 8 decimal places. The total number of currency units available is 21 x 1,000,000 x 100,000,000 which is 2.1 quadrillion. The current U.S. M1 supply is 3340.50 Billion dollars. You could run every country on two earths with 2.1 quadrillion units. No worries.