The supply issue

[Darker45]

The 21^st million Bitcoin is a dead end. The number does not go higher than that. It is the limit. This fact alone could somehow explain why Bitcoin is scarce. It is not unlimited.

Now, if the future is so positive for Bitcoin that all the billions of people around the world will have to have a share of that supply, then it is not a problem at all as there is indeed Satoshi and even much smaller units of 2nd layer protocols, but such subdivisions do not add supply to Bitcoin. It does not in any way alter the limited supply.

In a more practical note, I think I'd be happy if people would start dividing even a Satoshi up to 10 decimals. That means I have grown rich.

[Lucius]

The only supply issue which exists for some is one that does not allow them to mine BTC in the quantities they want. Given how the whole system is set up, they can always print as much money as they want, dig up as much gold or diamonds as they need, or produce anything in any quantity.

Bitcoin only shows that some of its features irritate some people who would like to control it and adapt it to their needs - but unlike calling the governor of a central bank or the owner of a company, how to influence millions of BTC owners around the world?

[darewaller]

Well, there are types of talks about this but one thing is for sure, bitcoin is bitcoin and nothing else is the same. For example you could have wrapped bitcoins as you might heard of, which means you basically have the same amount of bitcoin once over, but that just doesn't mean that there are two bitcoins, it means one of them is wrapped. Secondly you could have layers upon layers of bitcoin products, it all depends on buyer and sellers, the demand and supply, so yes in a way you could have billions of bitcoin layers, and as long as people want to buy it, the price will be alright.

However no matter how many type of tricks the finance world pulls off, no matter how many people are fine with buying it, there are no possible ways that bitcoin could ever change, one bitcoin is still one bitcoin and all the other layers are just the fake version of it.

[jaysabi]

I'm seeing this particular topic on twitter today and it's got me a bit stumped. So I would like to ask my hero bitcoiners here for their advice:

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

Yes, no matter how small the pieces of the pie you cut, the size of the whole pie never changes. That is, 21 million bitcoins is the size of the pie. You can cut it into satoshis, or sub-satoshis. The pieces can get smaller and smaller, but no matter what, you never get more pie.

[adzino]

I'm seeing this particular topic on twitter today and it's got me a bit stumped. So I would like to ask my hero bitcoiners here for their advice:

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

Yes, the 21 million BTC supply cap still matters. If this 2nd layer off network protocol allows you to subdivide satoshis into smaller unit, the 21 million BTC supply is still the same. It's not like when you split those satoshis into two, your supply changes to 42 million BTC. Add all those subdivided satoshis and you will end up with the same 21 million BTC. If there wasn't any cap, things wouldn't have been the same. We wouldn't even need those off network protocols or sub divide it into smaller units.

[Twentyonepaylots]

The supply would still matter because Satoshis are basically just utility tokens for bitcoin. So those have no value on their own and is piggybacking off of bitcoin's price. Regardless if you can subdivide your Satoshis into mini-Satoshis or not, the one who still holds the value is bitcoin, and in doing so would retain the integrity of the 21 million supply because soon as that runs out, future Satoshi Holders would have nothing in them but sad lumpy utility coins.

What matters in my opinion is the scarcity and deflationary feature. If you can keep Bitcoin immune to inflation (In whatever way that is sustainable, safe and decentralized) then the 21million cap wouldn't really matter much.

So far it does not seem to be affected by inflation the way fiat is, perhaps mainly because it does not really have a commodity that it's basing its value on, so it's not affected by inflation or whatsoever.

[acener]

Yes the supply would still matter even if we have a smaller fraction of Sat's or Satoshi.
Even if we would have smaller unit the whole supply would remain limited.
I don't even think that we would need a smaller fraction of Satoshi as of now but it is better to be prepared.
I wonder what would be the price of BTC when we finally be forced to use those small fraction of Satoshi like how we use Sats right now.

[inoes]

it seems less useful if the bitcoiners agree to add the fraction after Satoshi, because I don't really care about that. the bitcoin supply remains the same and as btc becomes more expensive, the transfer fees will increase in price. What will happen if we make a BTC transfer but the transferred fee is more expensive than the funds we transfer?

[zanezane]

The only supply issue which exists for some is one that does not allow them to mine BTC in the quantities they want. Given how the whole system is set up, they can always print as much money as they want, dig up as much gold or diamonds as they need, or produce anything in any quantity.

Bitcoin only shows that some of its features irritate some people who would like to control it and adapt it to their needs - but unlike calling the governor of a central bank or the owner of a company, how to influence millions of BTC owners around the world?

The only way I think that some individual can influence millions of user is by buying a lot of bitcoin. Mining is out of question because it incrementally gets more difficult as there are more bitcoins mined. Dividing it into smaller parts does not seem to be a good idea in my opinion because it defeats the purpose in some way, the people that owned 0.0001 would be richer than they were before the division.

[0t3p0t]

I'm seeing this particular topic on twitter today and it's got me a bit stumped. So I would like to ask my hero bitcoiners here for their advice:

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

I read a thread like this on the forum discussing about scarcity of Bitcoin compared to a piece of pizza but still ends something like your thread OP though it is on different source I think.

For me there is no issue regarding the supply of Bitcoin because as an enthusiast, investor, user or whatever you did with Bitcoin you already know from the beginning that you can have small fractions of it and acquiring Bitcoins won't make the supply increase as opposed to what others think of it coz it will be getting scarce no matter how small you got plus the halving of course.

[mu_enrico]

This is not a supply issue but a proportion or wealth distribution issue. The supply remains the same, i.e., 21 million unchanged.
Imagine someone owning 1% of Bitcoin, and ordinary people own 10 sats or 10,000 msats (let's say equal to $100).

The dude will have too much wealth. Therefore, there are many articles about this limited supply is a weakness.

[Hydrogen]

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

Years ago the minimum BTC wager on sports gambling websites was 0.01. Years later the minimum wager was adjusted to 0.001. Today many websites offer a minimum wager of 0.0001.

Its a natural progression for increasingly smaller denominations of BTC to become normalized as BTC value increases.

The extra decimal places on the right side could be considered a design feature to accommodate future growth and expansion.

[Dabs]

All of the practical bitcoins will have been mined in the next 20 years. There will have been 3 or 4 halving events by then, the block reward is down to 1.5 BTC or less, and there will be around 20 million whole bitcoins. In other words, the supply of coins would be about 99% already. The last one percent will take another 30 halving events over the next hundred years.

So between 2021 to 2040 ... each whole BTC will be at least 1 million USD already.

[magneto]

I'm seeing this particular topic on twitter today and it's got me a bit stumped. So I would like to ask my hero bitcoiners here for their advice:

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

What they're spewing is absolute nonsense and you should ignore it. Just because someone seems to be an "expert" doesn't mean that their opinion should trump your knowledge basic mathematical principles.

Subdividing does nothing more than helping people transact when BTC prices go up further. Note the causal effect here - only when BTC prices go up is there ever a need to subdivide more. Subdivision does NOT cause prices to go up or bitcoin to become more abundant overnight.

Just think about this analogy. If your bank has an accounting system that goes to 5 decimal places even when others only have 2, does that mean that fiat all of a sudden becomes more abundant? Absolutely not. It's just for the ease of accounting when values have appreciated so much to warrant it.

[exstasie]

The extra decimal places on the right side could be considered a design feature to accommodate future growth and expansion.

Well I guess that's one of the questions being raised here: what happens if/when satoshis become too large of a unit and there are no more zeros to the right? The obvious answer is to sub-divide into smaller units.

But if you think about it, that situation seems rather unlikely: $1 satoshis implies $100M BTC. I'm insanely bullish, more than most, but even I can't conceive of that, assuming USD hasn't hyperinflated.

That's why this whole discussion is sort of a joke. A very unrealistic hypothetical (like $100M BTC) is being used to arbitrarily shake faith in Bitcoin's supply dynamics.

I wonder why?

[jacafbiz]

It does not matter, it doesn't matter, Bitcoin can still be divided into Bit or Sat. As we know now, many people can't afford to own one BTC at the current price and if you want in, you buy fraction of it. With new institutional money entering the space I expect more of this supply side issue on exchange because no one would want to sell at the current price knowing the price could go up tomorrow

[eaLiTy]

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

You do not need a second layer solution to subdivide the coins into small fractions, just take fiat currency, one dollar can be subdivided into 100 cents and yet it is one dollar and you need to apply the same standard to BTCitcoin until anyone convince me otherwise which is highly unlikely because 21 million BTCitcoins is the benchmark on the number of coins in existence .

[bits4books]

You have a strict limit of 21 million and then you decide "and let's divide 1 BTC indefinitely". And why? What is the difference between the infinite division of one whole and the gradual emission of new funds when necessary? These are two absolutely identical processes from the point of view of the end user - only the first one causes fear that this is a bubble, and the second one causes a certain level of inflation.

One process debases the currency by increasing the money supply, the other process makes lower value transactions possible by increasing unit divisibility. These are two very distinct and unrelated things. Why do you conflate them?

In any case, I'm not sure we actually need more divisibility. Even if 1 BTC = $1M, a satoshi is worth $0.01. Do we really need sub-penny value transactions?

So after all, the conceptual problem of the entire cryptocurrency in general is that people want these transactions in the amount of a penny - the main thing is that it would not be a pure dollar but money in the form of BTC/ETH/whatever that tied to dollar.
You can divide BTC at least as much as you want and let it grow to the most cosmic prices but as long as you yourself tie it to the dollar and do not want to untie it, then you are just hostages of the most hated fiat currency.
Very simple math - the more BTC is worth and the more people use it, the greater the divisibility of BTC and the more dollars will be printed to crypto - fiat exchange. Why more dollars? Because in addition to the ever-growing crypto community, there are also ordinary people who do not want to know about all this and just dollars will be enough for them. And to all of you-they-we need those dollars to print.

[jrrsparkles]

I'm seeing this particular topic on twitter today and it's got me a bit stumped. So I would like to ask my hero bitcoiners here for their advice:

If bitcoin's price and market cap continue to increase, and if a 2nd layer or off-network protocol allows people to subdivide their satoshis into smaller and smaller units, does the whole 21 million BTC supply cap even matter anymore?

You can divide bitcoin into any figures you want and the smallest possible divide is 1 sat which is equals to 0.00000001 BTC so it is nether going to increase nor decrease the total maximum supply of bitcoin.

[The Sceptical Chymist]

This has been a pretty hot topic on Twitter quite recently
<snip>
I mean holy crap that Frances Coppola woman on Twitter is totally bollocks.

Another reason I don't use Twitter--the idiots and overall idiocy that seems to abound there.  Not sure what the Coppola woman thing is all about, but now I'm curious.

And no, it doesn't matter if you can split a satoshi.  Another analogy would be like splitting an atom.  The total weight of the atom does not change, no matter how many subatomic particles it's split into (and dammit if I'm wrong, let some physicist correct me but I think you get the idea). 

But actually what this sounds like is that a lot of otherwise bitcoin-ignorant people are starting to think about bitcoin, and I don't see that as a bad thing necessarily.