Why reward halving instead of doubling?

[Assface16678]

If you make a continuation of mining of bitcoin it hits hard the rule of the market that is the supply and demand and the halving is only coming every four years, and I think it is quite balanced and normal if many people getting mine a lot of coins the market price of the bitcoin does not becomes profitable enough because many people now hold the same value and also the halving is good because not all the people are going to mining think about this many people getting more mining computers of bitcoin and they now using those power to make more money without doing anything just to mine.

[1715082282]

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[XCANA]

Well, the action taken by Satoshi Nakamoto was taken because things of this nature will occur in the mind of the Bitcoiners. Believed me, the actions taken in my opinion was to reward the early adoptors and not to randomly give richies to those out there. This was a great move for the entire technology to strive hence it may not. Reward halving is better than doubling holders, think of this mate: those who help built a network be left aside and then reward those who get involve into the network for quick Cash out or to enrich themselves.

[DooMAD]

Put it this way.  Of all the myriad coins out there that have tried different distribution schemes, none of them are ever likely to be as successful as this one.

We could spend forever debating how or why that decision was reached, but at the end of the day, it worked.  If you could go back in time and make major alterations, there's no guarantee the result would have been the same.

[MrcMrc]

I can say Satoshi can not be just only one person, he created bitcoin in a way that it will be limited, scare and reducing in supply. These are what keeps bitcoin growing. Otherwise, bitcoin will be nothing.

[FanatMonet]

Everything is very logical, a reduction in supply will stimulate a price increase, but with the opposite option, bitcoin would only depreciate faster and faster, also it is not worth explaining what high risks the first bitcoin users bore, unlike the current ones. Therefore, these considerations have nothing to themselves.

[NotATether]

1.
New generated coins are reduced, so the inflation rate is reduced.
Now the inflation rate is 3.7%. After halving, it will decrease to 1.8%.
After 2024 halving, the inflation rate will be lower than 1% which is lower than the inflation rate in almost all developed countries.

Does the reason we're seeing the bitcoin price fluctuating by $2000 have something to do with its large inflation rate? We see developing countries with that kind of inflation rate lose half or a third of its currency value every now and then. 3.7% sounds like a lot of inflation but I don't know how the inflation rate affects the current price of bitcoin. When the inflation rate goes down, shouldn't it make bitcoin change price less drastically? Between now and 2016 halving we're no longer seeing price changes by the hundreds but by the thousands, even though the inflation rate is less than it was before 2016.

So does that mean after the next halving, price changes by even more thousands of dollars will be regular?

[gundala]

I think this is a comparable appreciation for early adopters. The system that has been designed by Satoshi makes the internal value scale of BTC tends to increase, moreover the blockchain is increasingly popular and adopted by many companies. With limited supply, the level of difficulty of mining which also increases, demand increases, it will increase prices. This is not an instant process, there are times when correction, strategy, and mental are needed. There is no guarantee that prices will always go up, understand the risks and use the best possible opportunity to make a profit

[Oilacris]

What was Satoshi's reasoning behind halving the mining reward over time? Why did he not instead choose to do it in reverse and double the reward at each "doubling" (up to 50 BTC and then 0 - same total mined reward but distributed in reverse order)?

It seems that increasing the mining reward over time would have made more sense for at least two reasons:

1) It doesn't favor early adopters.

2) As mining difficulty rises, so does the cost of mining and therefore, the reward should be higher as well. Of course the rising price of BTC compensates for that but as we've seen recently, the price doesn't necessarily grow all the time.

Discuss.

So you do talk about reversing the whole system? Doubling reward rather than halving? If thats the case then we wont see on where Bitcoin is placed now.
Satoshi made the entire system to be like this and i dont see anything wrong with this perfect idea not only it limits out the supply but also its also not prone
to centralization.When it comes to miners then only the toughest ones would able to sustain in spite of the current price we are into.

[Stedsm]

So basically, based on your theory, BTC rewards should be doubled. But what exactly will it do? It'll speed up the entire process of getting all that BTC on the table to be mined as quickly as drinking a cup of coffee. It'd have been all mined years ago if this theory was to be considered from the beginning. The reason why we all follow the halving strategy is the fact that the cause behind BTC's price rise is this halving only, whether you trust us or not.

[20kevin20]

Put it this way.  Of all the myriad coins out there that have tried different distribution schemes, none of them are ever likely to be as successful as this one.

We could spend forever debating how or why that decision was reached, but at the end of the day, it worked.  If you could go back in time and make major alterations, there's no guarantee the result would have been the same.

If we were to have doubling every 4 years instead of halving, it'd look more like a scary event than an exciting one. In fact, wouldn't BTC turn into a ponzi scheme?

Bitcoin was launched and had only a handful of people supporting it in the early days. If we had block reward doubling, it means BTC would be 2x less scarce every 4 years.. so in order to keep its price up, we would've needed to gather more and more investors to keep pumping money in it to maintain the price - until they can't

I mean, imo Satoshi placed the best distribution scheme on BTC and it's a proven huge success like you said. If we had BTC start from a block reward doubling scheme, we would've had an alt overtake it as soon as a dev thought of creating a scace cryptocurrency. Hence, BTC would've been a big shitcoin right now..

[philipma1957]

What was Satoshi's reasoning behind halving the mining reward over time? Why did he not instead choose to do it in reverse and double the reward at each "doubling" (up to 50 BTC and then 0 - same total mined reward but distributed in reverse order)?

It seems that increasing the mining reward over time would have made more sense for at least two reasons:

1) It doesn't favor early adopters.

2) As mining difficulty rises, so does the cost of mining and therefore, the reward should be higher as well. Of course the rising price of BTC compensates for that but as we've seen recently, the price doesn't necessarily grow all the time.

Discuss.

Well  who the fuck is going to mine for 0 that's why.

I would argue  that  instead of 21million coins with ½ ings every 4 years.

  32 million coins with ½ ings every 6 years would have given more time for it to be adopted.

We would be coming up to second ½ ing in 2021

I see issues with bitcoin at the  ½ ing point  that drops us to 0.78125 coins reward   that is only 8 years from now.

If we split at  6 years

2015 25 coins
2021 12.5 coins
2027  6.25 coins
2033  3.125 coins
2039  1.5625 coins
2045   0.78125 coins

our track now is

2012  25
2016  12.5
2020   6.25
2024   3.125
2028   1.5625
2032   0.78125

I don't see how it works  at this pace.

[NotATether]

our track now is

2012  25
2016  12.5
2020   6.25
2024   3.125
2028   1.5625
2032   0.78125

In the distant future, bitcoin's price curve will eventually flatten, probably after one of those future years you quoted. I wonder how much of an increase transaction fees would need to get to incentivize miners to stay.

[gmaxwell]

I wonder how much of an increase transaction fees would need to get to incentivize miners to stay.

Wrong question.  Difficulty is floating, it'll adapt to whatever is there.  A single asicminer using a hundred watts is enough to keep blocks being produced.

The question you should instead ask is "how much of an increase is needed to keep security acceptable?". Because if a single asicminer is all thats keeping the network going then two asicminers would be all that were needed to reorg blocks and replace recent transactions (and twenty could replace ones that weren't particularly recent!).

A couple years ago during congestion before segwit was rolled out, there were sustained total fees in amounts similar to the block subsidy!  So I think that's pretty strong evidence that fees can be high enough to provide for reasonable amounts of security.

At the moment Bitcoin arguably has too much capacity now between changing usage patterns (e.g. batching, and sweeping during low fee times) and segwit and as a result fees are floating at about 2% of subsidy and often running right at the default minimum relay fee. After the halving they'll end up about 4% (though, likely they'll go much higher in a brief period after the halving due to congestion, due to the rate of block production going down for a little while).

[Cryptoheavy]

It started from 50 fo faster development of supply volume. And now it going to be lower and lower for higher prices and lower inflation