Are hardfork's jeopardising Bitcoin's ideal of "limited supply"?

[pat_13b]

Hi Guys,

I've been thinking about the recent hard fork of bitcoin and how it produced bitcoin cash.

People often draw the comparison from Bitcoin to gold due to the limited supply constraint. However, if hard forks continue to occur, then it seems like the bitcoin supply is increased i.e. 21,000,000 bitcoin (eventually) and 21,000,000 bitcoin cash (eventually) and with potential for this to reoccurr over and over if the bitcoin community fragments. In my opinion, another hard fork seems likely at some point over another contentious issue.

I know that the idea is that the less successful version will eventually be supported less and slowly die, but in my eyes it hurts the "scarcity" aspect of bitcoin. Also, it worries me that value could swing from one fork to the other rapidly and kill a person's investment. I know it's a volitile market but I feel like this bug slightly undermines bitcoin...

Whereas, there's no way to fork or duplicate gold.

Does this affect the long term "scarcity" prospect of bitcoin or is there some other technical aspect I'm not considering?

Cheers

[GideonGono]

No. Bitcoin and BitcoinCash are two different coins, digital currency or cryptocurrency. Bitcoin has different market so thus BitcoinCash. Also there is only one Bitcoin and one BitcoinCash. You shouldn't interchange these two coins. Bitcoin's supply has a capped of 21M and it can never be changed and so thus BitcoinCash having 21M cap like Bitcoin. I constructed my post like this for you to get the context that these two are different things.

[pat_13b]

Thanks for the reply.

I have read and re-read to try and get the subtlety of what you're saying but I'm not convinced.

The fundamentals of the bitcoin cash protocol are almost identical to the fundamentals of bitcoin, so surely the hard fork will dilute the combined market until such time that the inferior coin dies? (even if the current valuation doesn't reflect this... YET)

[pooya87]

you can create new coins any time you wish. it is just code, you click a button and viola a new coin is born!

that doesn't mean bitcoin's supply is not limited any more! that just means a new and separate coin is created. it is like saying if we mine silver and iron, the gold supply will no longer be limited.

also you should know that most of the currently existing altcoins (eg. litecoin, dogecoin) are fork of bitcoin. and each of these currently have a supply (eg 52 mil, 110 bil) and that never changed anything about bitcoin.