first of all "limited" does not mean "not enough".
think of limited supply as the opposite of what fiat has. you can't print bitcoin like you can print money without much of a limitation. but there is enough units in bitcoin to suffice usage.
secondly forks have nothing to do with bitcoin's supply. there already have been 2 hard forks directly from bitcoin with its blockchain. which one of them can you use as payment in your Microsoft account? that is right only bitcoin. not bitcoin x nor bitcoin y nor bitcoin z. only bitcoin. that means all those x and y and z are altcoins.
Yeah I know limited doesn't not enough, I meant limited as in a finite number of tokens. I do fully get what you mean about not being able to just make more of bitcoin as and when the developers want to, and I understand about BCH etc being altcoins my point was just that altcoins can be made from nothing essentially.
The thing is, how I see it, it doesn't have a limited number of coins at all. If every time the code is forked a new coin can be generated then surely this is no different to the developers being able to mint as many coins as they like, whenever they like.
No. They're able to create a fork with a new coin which is unrelated to the previous chain.
If the new chain does not gain a significant value, then the "supply increase" is irrelevant. Even if it does, users can choose to continue using the original chain (which has a maximum of 21 million coins) for as long as they like, and so the supply of the "original" BTC never increases at all.
I suppose you could more accurately say that the current Bitcoin chain will never have more than 21 million coins, and that it seems extremely unlikely that a new chain with a supply increase would garner any support.
the developers
Note that the Bitcoin Core developers are just the group that run the reference client. If they tried to do something outrageous like increase the supply (which is very unlikely), other developers would just continue developing based on the older Bitcoin Core clients, or possibly with a new reference client.
Yeah like above, I get that its not BTC having it's volume increased, I think I worded my question wrongly, I mean more that the ability to make as many altcoins kind of seems flawed, am I missing sometihng about the way the fork create altcoins?
great question ... it always reminds me stuff .. questions such as converting signals from analog to digital, and that blood philosophical question Gavin made years ago about the 'last satoshi' ...
All I have to say is copy and past my textbook ...
'the medium is the message' (McLuhan, 1964)
Haha analogue to digital (sound signals) is actually something I understand a hell of a lot more about! I do undertand your point abou tthe McLuhan quote though.
