Can Bitcoin protocol be changed to allow for a larger supply?

[klava1983]

Only 21 million Bitcoins can be mined in total. Currently, about 18 million of them have been already mined. Moreover, according to studies, 5 million Bitcoins (or even more) are lost forever.
I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption, so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

[mk4]

A change to Bitcoin's total supply would require a hard fork; which obviously, a lot of people are against(both with hard forks and increasing of supply). So you might as well say it's next to impossible.

I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption, so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

How is it not enough? Bitcoin is highly highly divisible. If you can't buy one whole bar of gold, then you buy a gram of it. Same thing with bitcoin. As bitcoin's price goes higher and as bitcoin gets widely used for merchant payments, probably expect us to be using the "satoshi" or "sats" denomination sometime in the future.

1 Satoshi   = 0.00000001 ฿   
10 Satoshi   = 0.00000010 ฿   
100 Satoshi   = 0.00000100 ฿   = 1 Bit / μBTC (you-bit)
1,000 Satoshi   = 0.00001000 ฿   
10,000 Satoshi   = 0.00010000 ฿   
100,000 Satoshi   = 0.00100000 ฿   = 1 mBTC (em-bit)
1,000,000 Satoshi   = 0.01000000 ฿   = 1 cBTC (bitcent)
10,000,000 Satoshi   = 0.10000000 ฿   
100,000,000 Satoshi   = 1.00000000 ฿   

Source: https://www.btcsatoshi.com/

[oleg8791]

Limited supply is very important principle of Bitcoin philosophy. Bitcoin is volatile, but it also has been deflationary throughout its life.

[odolvlobo]

I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption, so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

Perhaps you would explain why you believe that 2100000000000000 satoshis (that's 2100000000000000000 millisatoshis for those using the Lightning Network) is not enough.

[gentlemand]

Of course it's possible.

It's getting everyone to agree to it that'll be the very, very, very, very hard part.

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

[Jet Cash]

You could have a scrip issue - everyone with a bitcoin gets 9 more ( say ), and that would raise the pool to 210 million, but each would be worth 1/10 of the value. But what would be the point? I can see the day when Satoshi is the unit of exchange, and Bitcoin is the name of the currency. Rather like Sterling and the pound, and the Renminbi and the Yuan.

[20kevin20]

Of course it's possible.

It's getting everyone to agree to it that'll be the very, very, very, very hard part.

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

The only way they might convince someone to do it is if they promote the "21 million Bitcoins aren't enough to the world's population" idea.

But if we think it thoroughly, why would it be a problem if.. say through a hard fork the new Max Supply would be multiplied by x100 (so 2,100,000,000BTC max) and everyone has their balance multiplied x100 simultaneously? If Bitcoin is going to stay in the top as the beast of all cryptocurrencies, it would even with this hard fork happening, right?

[Nadziratel]

Of course it's possible.

It's getting everyone to agree to it that'll be the very, very, very, very hard part.

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

I think the number of 21 million is just a deceptive view. An illusion. And there is never a need to play with this number.
So there is no need to fork or anything else to increase BTC amount.

[Artemis3]

Of course it's possible.

It's getting everyone to agree to it that'll be the very, very, very, very hard part.

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

I think the number of 21 million is just a deceptive view. An illusion. And there is never a need to play with this number.
So there is no need to fork or anything else to increase BTC amount.

Yes, indeed. The real number is the number of satoshis, which approaches 21 million x 100 million. Once you start thinking in satoshis you can see there are plenty of them to do anything. Not sure about the LN further subdivision.

Realistically bitcoins are way too expensive for anything but expensive things, like property, cars, etc. But as someone said, the bitcoin itself is just a cosmetic unit of measure shown in wallets, just like the mBTC, the real one being the satoshi.

Somewhere it was defined 100 million satoshis make a bitcoin, but because this is not in code, we could redefine this without touching anything beyond the cosmetic units displayed. Everyone would just want to agree and that is that.

They could say: "starting tomorrow, the bitcoin is no longer 100 million, but 1 million satoshis." Then those owning 1 bitcoin yesterday tomorrow can say they have 100 bitcoin under the new denomination (1 million satoshis). Obviously if the bitcoin is 10000 USD then it would cost to 100 USD to remain the same, since its the number of satoshis what actually matters.

I wonder if people would get really confused by this? They do that often with fiat that go hyperinflation, not that it means anything beyond "human convenience" for expressing price of things etc. While governments can do that to fiat by decree, i wonder how would the community react to such?

I personally don't mind, but "larger supply" (as in more satoshis) is absolutely not needed.

[Zemomtum]

Well, that what makes the price to always skyrocket. When a product is scarce, what is the result? We can have a fraction of Bitcoin and there will be no need to increase the protocol.

[mk4]

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

If I remember correctly, Peter Todd was advocating of removing the 21 million supply cap for bitcoin to have a forever 1% inflation for security purposes. Though his explanation was somewhat reasonable(though I'm not for it), and even though he is a very reputable personality in the bitcoin space, a lot of people disagreed and laughed at the idea. It just shows how changing things this big is very very unlikely to happen.

[pooya87]

according to studies, 5 million Bitcoins (or even more) are lost forever.

wrong.
this is not based "studies", this is based on "guesses" and there is a big difference. basically all of them are considering any coin that has not moved for N days as "lost" that is why the numbers they report is so huge. the reality is that there are many who have been buying and holding (me included) coins for long term but they all still have full control over their keys.

I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption, so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

"thinking" that is not enough, if some day in the future we really saw that the supply (whatever it was at the time) weren't enough then by that time we could change the supply to solve that problem.

[figmentofmyass]

Maybe one day someone will make a concerted effort to do it. Everyone else will laugh in their tits. I'll be drooling in my euthanasia booth by then so don't care.

If I remember correctly, Peter Todd was advocating of removing the 21 million supply cap for bitcoin to have a forever 1% inflation for security purposes.

he never actually advocated for it. he just said bitcoin should have been implemented that way. he knows that it would never happen!

IMO Bitcoin should have had an explicit 1%/year or so security tax, implemented via inflation...but even then you can't guarantee all BTC users will use Bitcoin, which means fees for security still needed as a backup.

[franky1]

the btc code is not measuring the tokens in BTC. infact the code is measuring it in 'satoshi's'

the 'btc' is just a basket term for 100,000,000 satoshis.

the core team of devs are actually thinking of changing things to actually have 1000x more tokens per btc basket name.

yep 100,000,000,000 tokens per btc instead of 100,000,000
though this can cause alot of problems and alot of possible bugs and issues. they still want to try it one day.

i fond it absolutely foolish to do this. as much as i find it foolish to increase the number of 'btc's' which previous teams talked about doing years ago.

things should stay as they are with BTC remaining with a 21mill BTC limit and each BTC having 100mill sats.

2.100,000,000,000,000 tokens splitable/sharable currently is more than enough

[Debonaire217]

It is pretty exciting to see bitcoin opening its protocol to adopt new improvements and to better fit the needs of the people, but what makes bitcoin the best is its consistency. If bitcoin will have a larger supply, its demand will not increase that much, resulting for people to see bitcoin to end its characteristic to provide better profits in terms of investment. In addition, we just made bitcoin untrustworthy when in the end, we could change its protocol.

[gentlemand]

The only way they might convince someone to do it is if they promote the "21 million Bitcoins aren't enough to the world's population" idea.

But if we think it thoroughly, why would it be a problem if.. say through a hard fork the new Max Supply would be multiplied by x100 (so 2,100,000,000BTC max) and everyone has their balance multiplied x100 simultaneously? If Bitcoin is going to stay in the top as the beast of all cryptocurrencies, it would even with this hard fork happening, right?

1 satoshi equalling 1 cent would be a 1 million dollar Bitcoin. Nice problem to have.

It's possible you could have more units on a second layer since that would be the quasi cash. It would only hit the main chain when rounded up into much larger amounts anyway.

[hatshepsut93]

I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption, so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

People don't make critical decisions in software with millions of user just because they "think" that something should be done, you need to make a proper scientific research where you defend your conjecture with facts, statistically significant data, mathematical calculations, etc.

[ray_saeed]

In theory it can be changed with a fork but miners will be against it

[Lucius]

When I see a question like this posted by a beginner, the first thing that comes to my mind is actually the classic thinking of the average person who thinks that if the total amount of something goes up that the price of the same will go down. If by some miracle the total supply would increase from 21 million, this would definitely cause the price to fall not only because of increased supply but for lack of confidence in BTC.

There are things that need to stay just the way the creator put them, for everything else there are forks of BTC. Not even them (at least the more famous ones) did not interfere with total supply.

[DannyHamilton]

Only 21 million Bitcoins can be mined in total. Currently, about 18 million of them have been already mined. Moreover, according to studies, 5 million Bitcoins (or even more) are lost forever.

That's a reasonable approximation.

I think this supply isn't enough for world-wide using and mass adoption

Fortunately, Bitcoin doesn't care what you think. Bitcoin is a voluntary system, if you don't like it, don't use bitcoin.  Bitcoin is a voluntary system.

Bitcoin is just a number.  If 21 million Bitcoins isn't enough, then how about 21 billion millibitcoin?

If 21 billion millibitcoin isn't enough, then how about 21 trillion microbitcoin?

If 21 trillion microbitcoin isn't enough, then how about 21 quadrillion nanobitcoin?

If 21 quadrillion nanobitcoin isn't enough, then how about 21 quintillion picobitcoin?

See, that's the surprising thing about numbers, they can always be divided resulting in smaller numbers.

so is Bitcoin supply really finite and unchangeable?

Effectively, yes.  However, we can use ever smaller portions of those bitcoin as needed.