Bitcoin's 'limted' supply lie

[BitcoinAshley]

So op, by your logic, adding or removing the nickel or the ha-penny from circulation will affect the value of the U.S. dollar? If I remove the canadian nickel from circulation is everyone's canadian dollar worth more?
 

No one's addressing your argument becuase it's already been addressed hundreds of times whenever a troll brings it up. Still, gotta love how you act entitled to a thorough rebuttal despite being the 'n'th person to post about this in the last year. It's nearly effortless to debunk and if everyone knows the argument by heart, no one's going to bother to respond to you - instead, we'll just troll you back and make fun of you. 

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[Zangelbert Bingledack]

revans,

There's several more basic confusions to clear up.

Try this: http://freedom-school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf

No thanks. He's a Libertarian crackpot

The logic is laid out step by step. Stop on the page where you either start disagreeing or don't understand. That would enable a productive dialog.

[ProfMac]

Saying that there can only ever be 21 million Bitcoins is an empty scarcity argument, because the actual value of a Bitcoin is not yet settled by the market.

The 21 million is limited by the mining software.  The USD / BTC exchange rate is not relevant to this.

Well, it is. The more value that accrues to a Bitcoin the greater the demand for subunits to fractionalise value.

The number of fractional sub-units is also defined.  The minimum unit is 1 Satoshi.  There are 2,100,000,000,000,000 of them.

[gtabmx]

This has been debated to death, but perhaps re-framing the argument might show how hollow Bitcoin's scarcity argument is.


Bitcoin cultist's claim one of its greatest virtues is that the supply of Bitcoins is limited to 21 million, but of course if Bitcoin was ever to become the global default currency its promulgators dream about, each Bitcoin would denominationally represent a huge USD equivalent. To this end, if the US treasury said that it was restructuring the USD such that there would be 21 million MegaDollars maximum, but that each of those MegaDollars could be dived up to infinity, does it suddenly become sound money?

http://www.troll.me/images/futurama-fry/not-sure-if-trolling-or-just-an-idiot.jpg

[piramida]

didnt the OP make this same exact post a week ago?

And here I thought this was all some kind of weird deja-vu. 

Guess I'm not prescient after all. I Better go adjust my bids and asks, lol.

Yeah he's a boring and repetitve troll. No wonder his Ignore button is getting much use.

[shadowninjax]

Op, sadly, your title is a lie, instead of limited supply being a lie. Go look at the bitcoin's code.

As for dividing into smaller digits, it makes no difference.

[superduh]

why feed the troll? he's obliviously trying to sound stupid for some unknown reason.

[Sindelar1938]

Not another one of these threads

Sigh!

[kokoon]

Op, please address this post, are you maybe thinking about it like this:

2 years ago, person A bought 100 BTC for $0.01. Yesterday person B bought 100 SATOSHIS for $0.01. Both persons bought a hundred of units of bitcoin currency for the same amount of $. But in fact it's not the same, the 100 that person B bought for $0.01 is worth far less! Those are not the same units, just the number "100" is the same. Person A is 100.000.000 times more wealthy than person B.

Op, I'm asking you, is this what you mean?

[traderCJ]

I think his argument is more .. philosophical.  Here we have an infinite amount of something (his megabucks).  It only makes sense to assign a $0 value to something which is infinite.  What he fails to comprehend is that those infinitesimally small chunks of megabucks all combine to form something which is scarce (the total supply of megabucks).  It's a semantics paradox.  In the limit, the chunks are worth $0, but in practicality (outside the limit), those (gold bars, let's say) are split into atoms, each with a very small value which when summed together equal the total value of the gold bar.  I'm not sure whether he is genuinely confused or simply trying to confuse the readers on this forum.  Either way, not a very impressive argument against Bitcoin.  Don't quit your day job ..

[kokoon]

Yeah, could be that. But "infinite divisibility" is a theoretical construct, in practice every divisibility is finite. Therefore parts remain > 0.

Well in case he's not trolling, it could be that he's just really bad at explaining his ideas. But it looks like he's not even trying, so it's probably trolling.

[Kazimir]

This has been debated to death, but perhaps re-framing the argument might show how hollow Bitcoin's scarcity argument is.


Bitcoin cultist's claim one of its greatest virtues is that the supply of Bitcoins is limited to 21 million, but of course if Bitcoin was ever to become the global default currency its promulgators dream about, each Bitcoin would denominationally represent a huge USD equivalent. To this end, if the US treasury said that it was restructuring the USD such that there would be 21 million MegaDollars maximum, but that each of those MegaDollars could be dived up to infinity, does it suddenly become sound money?

Yes it does. Because if the U.S. treasury decides this, who effectively gets all the new units (the microDollars or picoDollars) that are introduced by dividing MegaDollars?

Compare this to: who gets all the new money that is introduced when the FED prints yet another $150 billion?

In case you still don't see the point, let me spell it out for you:

Dividing existing money into smaller units = new money gets evenly distributed amongst everybody who already owned money before. If you owned 0.00x% of the wealth before, you still do now, excepts it is worth a bit more. Seems fair to me.

Printing new money = only FED and banks get the new money, at the expense of the rest of society (as our existing dollars become less valuable). If you owned 0.00x% of the wealth before, you no longer do now, and it's worth less. SUCKS.

[mp420]

Scarcity and divisibility are two different concepts.

Scarcity, in how it applies to Bitcoin, means that if I have one Bitcoin I can know for sure that I will forever own at least one 21 millionth of the total Bitcoin M0 money base. The fact that my 1 Bitcoin can be divided to however many decimal places does not change that.

Bitcoin has its weak points (mainly the scalability thing), but this is not one of them.

[PenAndPaper]

Scarcity and divisibility are two different concepts.

Scarcity, in how it applies to Bitcoin, means that if I have one Bitcoin I can know for sure that I will forever own at least one 21 millionth of the total Bitcoin M0 money base. The fact that my 1 Bitcoin can be divided to however many decimal places does not change that.

Bitcoin has its weak points (mainly the scalability thing), but this is not one of them.

What part of scalability you see as a weak point in bitcoin? Block size? There are concerns but nothing that can't be addressed.

[mp420]

Scarcity and divisibility are two different concepts.

Scarcity, in how it applies to Bitcoin, means that if I have one Bitcoin I can know for sure that I will forever own at least one 21 millionth of the total Bitcoin M0 money base. The fact that my 1 Bitcoin can be divided to however many decimal places does not change that.

Bitcoin has its weak points (mainly the scalability thing), but this is not one of them.

What part of scalability you see as a weak point in bitcoin? Block size? There are concerns but nothing that can't be addressed.

We are less than one order of magnitude away from hitting the max block size limit. And I can see no long term solution to the limit anyway.

We'll see much higher transaction fees when we start to pound against the block size limit.

(The fixed limit should have been replaced with a dynamic one when Satoshi was still around. It's much harder to do a hard fork now.)

[PenAndPaper]

Scarcity and divisibility are two different concepts.

Scarcity, in how it applies to Bitcoin, means that if I have one Bitcoin I can know for sure that I will forever own at least one 21 millionth of the total Bitcoin M0 money base. The fact that my 1 Bitcoin can be divided to however many decimal places does not change that.

Bitcoin has its weak points (mainly the scalability thing), but this is not one of them.

What part of scalability you see as a weak point in bitcoin? Block size? There are concerns but nothing that can't be addressed.

We are less than one order of magnitude away from hitting the max block size limit. And I can see no long term solution to the limit anyway.

We'll see much higher transaction fees when we start to pound against the block size limit.

(The fixed limit should have been replaced with a dynamic one when Satoshi was still around. It's much harder to do a hard fork now.)

Well there is some talking taking place right now around max block size and i don't see anyone panicking or something.
Developers seem pretty sure that things will scale well with the necessary changes.

[2_Thumbs_Up]

This has been debated to death, but perhaps re-framing the argument might show how hollow Bitcoin's scarcity argument is.


Bitcoin cultist's claim one of its greatest virtues is that the supply of Bitcoins is limited to 21 million, but of course if Bitcoin was ever to become the global default currency its promulgators dream about, each Bitcoin would denominationally represent a huge USD equivalent. To this end, if the US treasury said that it was restructuring the USD such that there would be 21 million MegaDollars maximum, but that each of those MegaDollars could be dived up to infinity, does it suddenly become sound money?

If there were no counterparty risk, then yes. It's the fact that you still have to trust the US government that would make it unsound in this case.

[enter`name`here]

Changing the definition of your units of measurement means nothing if the thing you are measuring stays the same.  If you cross the border into canada we measure distance in kilometers. This doesnt mean our cars go faster, just that the nominal value we use to measure speed is smaller.  We could measure speed in centimetres / hour if we wanted and the only thing it would affect is our road signs and spedomoeters.

[revans]

Scarcity and divisibility are two different concepts.

Scarcity, in how it applies to Bitcoin, means that if I have one Bitcoin I can know for sure that I will forever own at least one 21 millionth of the total Bitcoin M0 money base. The fact that my 1 Bitcoin can be divided to however many decimal places does not change that.

Bitcoin has its weak points (mainly the scalability thing), but this is not one of them.

What part of scalability you see as a weak point in bitcoin? Block size? There are concerns but nothing that can't be addressed.

We are less than one order of magnitude away from hitting the max block size limit. And I can see no long term solution to the limit anyway.

We'll see much higher transaction fees when we start to pound against the block size limit.

(The fixed limit should have been replaced with a dynamic one when Satoshi was still around. It's much harder to do a hard fork now.)

Well there is some talking taking place right now around max block size and i don't see anyone panicking or something.
Developers seem pretty sure that things will scale well with the necessary changes.

They say that in public, but read what they say on the private forum. Same with selfish mining problem, in public it was dismissed, on the mailing list  it is treated as a serious problem.

[traderCJ]

Has this thread cleared up your confusion on the infinite divisibility paradox?