What if ethereum had a maximum coin supply set from the beginning?

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Recently, I did realise that Ethereum does not have a maximum supply like other notable coins such as bitcoin.

     

Apparently, even Ethereum Cofounder Vitalik Buterin thought that Ether total supply wouldn't go past 100M at-least for a decade, but due to the popularity of the network, the 100M mark has already been surpassed. So last year on 1st April, he  proposed the cap of total ether at 120M , Not sure whether it was because Ether price had started tanking due to the bull ran hangover or it was an April fools day prank 

But anyways the proposal hasn't been implemented yet and to me, without a maximum supply, I see a risk of Ether's value not growing as expected or even deflation of its value as more coins come into circulation.

My question is, would Ether's price be much higher than it is today if it had a maximum supply cap from the very beginning like Bitcoin?

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[mrdeposit]

I am also uninformed about the total supply. I only know as much as the picture. But, not knowing the supply does not mean that mining will always continue at the same speed. So, like others, it acts as if it had a total supply. IMO ETH in the highest stair as it can and even if there was a total supply, it would not have risen.

[Invigorated]

Possibly we will have seen more accountability and openness on the Ethereum blockchain than we are seeing now. Also, I think, it will have brought much more value to the Ethereum token than what it is token. The total supply has remained speculative giving a picture that there are a lot more ether tokens left which could someday flood the market, causing people to lose so much of their investments. This alone has continued to brew fear and FUD amongst investors.

[omnik]

I am also uninformed about the total supply. I only know as much as the picture. But, not knowing the supply does not mean that mining will always continue at the same speed. So, like others, it acts as if it had a total supply. IMO ETH in the highest stair as it can and even if there was a total supply, it would not have risen.

The total supply of ethereum will be determined very soon as per the implementation of the POS casper. All coin gets by the miners will always goes to the circulating supply.
But the total supply will help us to determine it.

[cerberus5424]

If Ethereum had limited supply, at least as you said for a decade, its price would be much higher now. Unfortunately, Ethereum will not change its policy and therefore I prefer to invest in Bitcoin, although even under these conditions, Ethereum gives a significant profit.

[MakeMoneyBtc]

I think in the near future Etheteum will actually create a limit to its supply because it's mining cannot continue forever since it would reach billions of coins and the price would go down instead of upward. I don't know why the limit was not created from the beginning since this would have helped it a lot, but I guess the had a plan for this and they just wanted to see how the market will react to it.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

If Ethereum had limited supply, at least as you said for a decade, its price would be much higher now. Unfortunately, Ethereum will not change its policy and therefore I prefer to invest in Bitcoin, although even under these conditions, Ethereum gives a significant profit.

If there was a bull run and all the coins go past their all-time highs like last time, Ethereum would obviously be much more profitable percentage wise compared to BTC.
The proposal for change is already there but as you know, there could be some hurdles to implement it.

I don't know why the limit was not created from the beginning since this would have helped it a lot, but I guess the had a plan for this and they just wanted to see how the market will react to it.

Probably Vitalik Buterin and his team did not want Ethereum to have that many similarities as bitcoin. Another argument could be he never expected Ethereum to be so much adopted in the crypto world as Vitalik himself had predicted that ether's circulating supply would not cross the 100M mark at least for a decade.

[Raizou]

Probably, but you're relying on Bitcoin's success with 21M's power supply, right? Following this logic, of course the ETH price could be analyzed through a smaller offer. Would ETH cost the 2x if the supply was 2x smaller?

[puremage111]

Because ethereum has no maximum supply there, so it couldn't had a max cap? Does ethereum has a max coin supply there?
Anyhow if it has maximum coin supply, it wouldn't really make a differences there except for miners imo

[bigcash2011]

Yes it is very important to limit the total supply and community should know complete tokenomics because they are investing in hope of value growth but with increasing supply value cannot grow as expected. A year ago i was hearing that the eth supply max is 90 million but now its over 100 million so there is a need for the cap i hope there will not be anymore supply because this will be unfair for people investing at high prices.

[Callanta787]

 total max supply won't stop a good coin from reaching its goal so I'm less worried about max supply and even other altcoins with billion max supply are doing fine e.g ripple so let's wait and see what comes next after POS ETH upgrade

[Bitcoin_Arena]

Probably, but you're relying on Bitcoin's success with 21M's power supply, right? Following this logic, of course, the ETH price could be analyzed through a smaller offer. Would ETH cost the 2x if the supply was 2x smaller?

Of course, due to its popularity as a launchpad for most projects, everything would be different right now. High demand plus X2 fewer coins in the circulation would mean a much higher price than it is right now(am not going to use your x2 price increase assumption)

Let's say Ethereum had 1/2 the number of coins it has right now.. that would be roughly 52.5M Ethers. Now current market capitalization of ethereum is at $14,511,391,446 just barely enough to keep at second place from Ripple.

Imagine if ether's price was the same as it is today, the Market cap would be $138x52.5M = $7,245,000,000. this would be way so far away from ripples marketcap which would seem unrealistic since the two have quite very close market caps .

total max supply won't stop a good coin from reaching its goal so I'm less worried about max supply and even other altcoins with billion max supply are doing fine e.g ripple so let's wait and see what comes next after POS ETH upgrade

Am not saying it would stop anything... but the price would continue to depreciate over time due to an increased supply of coins. Look at ripple for example, how much is one coin? 

[mindrust]

Ethereum and ripple and both are scams.

Ripple corp owns more than %60 of the coin supply (most likely it is close to 80% since they also own some of the coins in circulation.) and eth is a clown show where Vitalik decides what'll happen.

Eth doesn't have a hard cap on the supply and they don't know what to do about it. Vitalik's calculation was wrong and who knows what else he miscalculated...

Both of them should just disappear so less people will get burned.

[BitcoinHodler]

to get the answer to your question you first have to understand what ETH is and what bitcoin and other coins are.

bitcoin is a currency, it is supposed to work that way and it also is supposed to be deflationary unlike the usual fiat that is inflationary. also it aims at fixing the problem with fiat that the government can print as much as they like any time they want.

now what is Ether? ether is just a token that is designed to work as a "fuel" to smart contracts. in fact it having value doesn't make much sense but unfortunately you can't create a token and not have it be traded. and it is designed to work on the platform called ethereum. so in order to do that it has to have unlimited supply. and  the result is that it will lose value in the long run because of that design but that doesn't matter because as i said ETH is not designed to be a currency or anything like that. it is just a token for smart contract usages.

Apparently, even Ethereum Cofounder Vitalik Buterin thought that Ether total supply wouldn't go past 100M at-least for a decade,

that is a dumb statement! where did you even get that from?
supply is not something you speculate about, it is clear when how much is going to be created thanks to  the design of PoW and difficulty you can predict it with a small tolerance.

[icalical]

I don't think fixed total supply will help Ether increase its value. But, I think that adding a fixed total supply to ETH is wrong because ETH is not the same as Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a payment coin, and Ether is a platform token. The main reason why Bitcoin has fixed supply is that they don't want bitcoin to be the same as fiat, where the authorities can make as much as fiat money they want. While Ether act as a gas for Ethereum platform, and  it will be wrong if Ether has max supply.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

that is a dumb statement! where did you even get that from?
supply is not something you speculate about, it is clear when how much is going to be created thanks to  the design of PoW and difficulty you can predict it with a small tolerance.

This is where I got it you hot head, https://www.reddit.com/r/ethereum/comments/5izcf5/lets_talk_about_the_projected_coin_supply_over/dbc66rd/
Vitalik posted it himself
Don't just think i posted it without any reading;

So here is a thought. Currently, because of the PoW ice age, the block time is scheduled to start increasing in mid-2017, and past around 2019 the increase is going to grow exponentially. The mining reward does NOT increase proportionately. Hence, there is already an exponential slowdown in the growth of the ETH supply built into the protocol; my script shows:

Block 3000000, approx ETH supply 87962556, time '2017-01-16 00:38:33.067775' blocktime 14.86
Block 3500000, approx ETH supply 90612556, time '2017-04-11 18:09:34.273529' blocktime 15.27
Block 4000000, approx ETH supply 93262556, time '2017-08-15 18:20:24.642729' blocktime 30.01
Block 4500000, approx ETH supply 95912556, time '2018-11-03 05:55:48.912370' blocktime 136.71
Block 5000000, approx ETH supply 98562556, time '2025-10-02 11:47:30.658317' blocktime 835.81
Block 5500000, approx ETH supply 101212556, time '2128-03-20 09:14:16.483692' blocktime 17183.83
Block 6000000, approx ETH supply 103862556, time '5189-09-26 20:57:59.367004' blocktime 520901.19

Hence, in the foreseeable future, the supply will not go far above 100 million.

PoS is likely to lead to quite low issuance rates; I am not comfortable promising zero, but if it is not much less than the current PoW then there is little point in making the switch in any case. If the community wishes to, while PoW is in play, it's possible to agree that any delay to the ice age bomb should also respect this general ETH supply growth curve, so in a situation where at time X if current ethereum would have a 75s block time, the ice age patch would set the block time to 15s and the block reward to 1 ETH (and adjust uncle/nephew rewards proportionately)

Guess who's dumb now

ETH is not designed to be a currency or anything like that. it is just a token for smart contract usages.

It's " just a token that is designed to work as a "fuel" to smart contracts" but this doesn't stop it from being a currency too. It's traded and it's can also be used to make payments just like bitcoin. come on, stop having a rigid mind.
Should we say Ether is not a form of cryptocurrency  

[wxganz]

Undoubtedly the price of ether will stay long in one position. The ether is still very bad due to the fact that the team can not update and misinformation arranged by Vitalik Buterin very bad impact on the company's shares.

[Bitcoin_Arena]

I don't think fixed total supply will help Ether increase its value. But, I think that adding a fixed total supply to ETH is wrong because ETH is not the same as Bitcoin, Bitcoin is a payment coin, and Ether is a platform token. The main reason why Bitcoin has fixed supply is that they don't want bitcoin to be the same as fiat, where the authorities can make as much as fiat money they want. While Ether act as a gas for Ethereum platform, and  it will be wrong if Ether has max supply.

You People get it so wrong.
In fact, with all due respect to Bitcoin since it's the God-Father of Cryptocurrencies, Bitcoin is a payment coin and can also be traded, Yes, that all bitcoin can be used for, nothing else.
Ethereum on the other side
Can also;
- Be used for payment
- Traded
- Its network is a launch platform for startups
- Development platform for Dapps and smart contracts.
Now tell me why this is not a good thing for the network?

The way you are reasoning is as though when ether gets a maximum supply cap, then "that will be the end of everything, there will be no more ether for gas"... LOL
It simply means the Ether price will be on the rise as the network gets more adoption. Gas will still be there and will still be charged in Ether until probably they switch to POS as planned.

Otherwise if being a payment coin was a big deal then why is 4-year-old Ether beating other 6+ year old payment coins in terms of market capitalisation? shouldn't they be closer to BTC?

[Pffrt]

If the supply was fixed, ETH could have some good bump because it has been used widely and still being used but because of its infinite supply I too barely think that price will get good bump. In the long term like 5-10 years from now, ETH will be have deflation as you mentioned.

[Bytem3]

Even if Ethereum hasn't limited supply, the mining difficulty will be dropping, with the latest upgrade that occurred a few hours ago mining difficulty increased by 33% (you get a reward of 2 ETH instead of 3 ETH).

https://coincodex.com/article/3129/ethereums-constantinople-upgrade-goes-live/