What is stopping the 21 million limit from being increased?

[hd49728]

This is not entirely true. In theory, the Bitcoin hard cap can be changed.

It can be changed but how many percent of Bitcoin holders want to have change of increasing total supply.

People want to have burn or buy back and burn programs in order to decrease the original total supply, it's helpful for price, while total supply increase does not help price rising but triggering its fall.

Like BlackHatCoiner pointed out, whoever feels they want to increase the hardcap can take their code elsewhere and get a different version just like we've seen with BCH, but he has to convince people into going along with him and good luck with that. Something Bitcoin cash haven't been able to do and even BSV couldn't. At least they all have the same max supply of 21 million.

There are many altcoins namely as Bitcoin forks but they are terribly weak altcoins and many of Bitcoin forks already died.
[How Many Bitcoin Forks Are There? You will be surprised!!!

Even BCH is a biggest and most successful Bitcoin fork, it's hard to consider it as a successful project. Years since the fork in 2017, BCH hashrate has been almost unchanged, not yet made its new all time high while Bitcoin hashrate has increased exponentially since that year. This partially makes BCH as a failed project and with bigger block capacity, BCH blocks are not full that shows low demand on using BCH blockchain daily.

https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-hashrate.html#alltime
https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/hashrate-bch.html#alltime

[macson]

As others have mentioned, there are consensus rules that prevent anyone from changing the Bitcoin supply. These are agreed-upon rules that every full node enforces when validating blocks and transactions, and within these rules, there's a rule that fixes Bitcoin's maximum supply at 21 million.

If any node changes the rules, for example, making the Bitcoin supply unlimited, that node will automatically be deemed invalid by the majority of the network and will be isolated from the main blockchain.

This is the main reason why we see so many Bitcoin forks. They all originate from groups that implement rules that differ from the main consensus, and this causes them to separate from the main network because the majority doesn't accept them.

[EluguHcman]

This is not entirely true. In theory, the Bitcoin hard cap can be changed.

It can be changed but how many percent of Bitcoin holders want to have change of increasing total supply.

People want to have burn or buy back and burn programs in order to decrease the original total supply, it's helpful for price, while total supply increase does not help price rising but triggering its fall.

Nothing is possible and nothing is impossible in the decentlized Blockchain where Bitcoin is technology that should not be 100% trusted while though reliable at the core than the centralized finance.

It is hardly convinceable that Bitcoin limited supplies could be reverted from the total 21 millions to something else while though benefits of doubt can only be given blindly because, we can only imagine it possibility due to the encoded technologies are opened source but unreasonable how it can be realistic to increase the total supplies or even tampers the Bitcoin core when mining and adoption scalabilities are beyond range to break the decentlized Blockchain technological concept.

[joniboini]

This is the main reason why we see so many Bitcoin forks. They all originate from groups that implement rules that differ from the main consensus, and this causes them to separate from the main network because the majority doesn't accept them.

Is there any specific fork that was launched because BTC supply is too small? I can only recall increasing block size or improving scalability in general as the main reason for that. I wonder if we'll see a fork where having more supply is the main benefit (probably never, unless the economy is fucked and too many coins are concentrated on 1 or 2 addresses).

[Ishicryptic]

Limited supply means higher demand, so who would bother to get more of it when the supply is on the high side? Do you not think that would result in the devaluation of the bitcoin price? This is what the community would never agree to, and I do not think any consensus reached for that reason would hold any ground. The moment inflation sets in, bitcoin is good as nothing, and that might possibly be the end for cryptocurrency.

No concensus can be reached for Bitcoin to exceed the 21 million caped supply, it's not impossible but it cannot happen because it will mean the end of Bitcoin as a store of value. When supply becomes saturated the value will continue to drop until it becomes no better than many shitcoins in the market. Bitcoin is where it is today and will continue to reach ATH in the future because it is decentralized and it has limited supply, if you remove anything from these core values that will be the end of it. People are trading their fiat into Bitcoin because it's a hedge against inflation, if Bitcoin were to become like fiat that can be reprinted at will it'll mean that hope is lost for a hedge against inflation.

[Cookdata]

Limited supply means higher demand, so who would bother to get more of it when the supply is on the high side? Do you not think that would result in the devaluation of the bitcoin price? This is what the community would never agree to, and I do not think any consensus reached for that reason would hold any ground. The moment inflation sets in, bitcoin is good as nothing, and that might possibly be the end for cryptocurrency.

No concensus can be reached for Bitcoin to exceed the 21 million caped supply, it's not impossible but it cannot happen because it will mean the end of Bitcoin as a store of value. When supply becomes saturated the value will continue to drop until it becomes no better than many shitcoins in the market. Bitcoin is where it is today and will continue to reach ATH in the future because it is decentralized and it has limited supply, if you remove anything from these core values that will be the end of it. People are trading their fiat into Bitcoin because it's a hedge against inflation, if Bitcoin were to become like fiat that can be reprinted at will it'll mean that hope is lost for a hedge against inflation.

You maybe right but I read an article by tromp about supply relationship scarcity^[1] and I'm a bit convinced that you can increase supply and demand can come in, theoretically and practically it's possible but Bitcoin earned trust of investors with been a limited supply and it's scarce, that makes many people love it, any idea to change or effect increase in the supply will break Bitcoin, we may risk seeing another Hardfork just like the days of Bitcoin cash and Bitcoin SV.

[1] https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5565607.msg66059080#msg66059080

By the way, tromp how do you deal with your name when people try to right "Trump" and they wrote tromp instead, your notification is going to be filled up especially with this reserve, Bitcoin dump and politics.

[Myleschetty]

Maybe this has been mentioned before, but I didn't bother to search.

Bitcoin has a "hard" 21 million limit.  So what's stopping it from being increased?

The rationale behind the implementation of a 21 million limited supply and block halving is that Bitcoin uses its consensus mechanism to maintain inflation. Bitcoin will lose it lose its value and legacy once it is the 21 million BTC is increased.
No true Bitcoiner will want it to happen, I'm sure. If you appear to miss the party, your only option is to take advantage of the upcoming market correction.

[nakamura12]

When the supply increase then the demand will decrease and when the demand decrease then the price decrease. If you can increase the demand then increasing the supply won't be a problem but for Bitcoin increasing the cap limit is impossible. You won't be able to see it happen like forever because of consensus if they will agree with the changes but as I have said "impossible" is due to that so there's no way that others would agree to increase the cap.

[PostQuantumBTC]

If bitcoin 21 million cap is increased, maybe ethereum or other shit coins will take over bitcoin because the price of bitcoin will fall, the increase in supply will cause the fall. The fall will continue as people will dump bitcoin, this will create panic and more people will sell and that can make bitcoin to become shit coins like others.

[Doan9269]

If the 21 million bitcoin increases, then there's a shift in ground which is not expected, we made those that have splitted from the bitcoin community (BCH) to have say over us, the trust in this also have not been confided, the value will decrease, but I like the fact that Satisho himself already made everything to best fit in with the protocol that makes 21 million bitcoin only.

[gordonics.com]

Is it possible to increase the Bitcoin supply? With consensus, yes. But whose consensus?
Most people in the world don't even know how Bitcoin works; if they were the ones voting on this consensus, anything could happen.

Consensus, however, must be expressed by those already involved in the project, such as holders, node managers, and miners. All of these are, to a greater or lesser extent, Bitcoin owners, and I don't think they want to split their Bitcoins.

A funny proposal about the limited supply was BIP 42.
https://bips.dev/42/

There is actually a proposal to transform the 21 million Bitcoins into 2100 trillion Bitcoins.
https://bips.dev/177/

[Pablo-wood]

Bitcoin has a "hard" 21 million limit.  So what's stopping it from being increased?

In  three keywords what is stopping bitcoin from increasing its total supply is

• Developers won't bother proposing a change
• Miners and nodes won't be willing to upgrade (hard fork)
• The community on the other hand can't be bought over because everyone is pseudonymous.

Even if developers decides to propose a change it can't be enforce because the ecosystem operates based on consensus, which implies any chain that increased supply will require a global consensus from miners to be accepted and we all know everyone in the ecosystem opposes altering the total supply so it gets rejected and becomes an irrelevant minority fork.

[pooya87]

Bitcoin vs Bitcoin Cash is an example of the process of social consensus. When Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash split because of incompatible consensus rules, both sides called their network "Bitcoin". Eventually one group gained overwhelming support and retained the Bitcoin name, while the other begrudgingly became Bitcoin Cash.

That's a wrong way of narrating the history though!

Ever since 2009 we have had this thing we call Bitcoin and it has remained Bitcoin. However, in this time many have created copies of it calling it different names. Bitcoin has never split into X and Y, it has continued existing as a singular Bitcoin while some people created dozens of copies of it like bitcoin gold, bitcoin cash, bitcoin ultimate, bitcoin silver, and so on.

You see the problem with bcash is that it never had any support to begin with, even before they created their copy of bitcoin. That is why it has always been an altcoin and will always be an altcoin.
There was never two sides either, bitcoin cash has always been known as bcash/BCH everywhere except for a little while in Roger Ver's site where he was scamming people who wanted to buy bitcoin and created a lot of complaints which you can find some of their topics in this forum as well (people complaining they've never received bitcoin they bought from Ver).

[PrivacyG]

There was never two sides either, bitcoin cash has always been known as bcash/BCH everywhere except for a little while in Roger Ver's site where he was scamming people who wanted to buy bitcoin and created a lot of complaints which you can find some of their topics in this forum as well (people complaining they've never received bitcoin they bought from Ver).

Did Bitcoin Cash not start when there was a large Block Size debate in the community and the community ended up splitting in two?

[tromp]

Did Bitcoin Cash not start when there was a large Block Size debate in the community and the community ended up splitting in two?

As Wikpedia says: Up to block (478,558), the bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash blockchains were identical.

So Bitcoin Cash started in 2009 as Bitcoin and diverged in the 2017 hard fork where they changed consensus rules by lifting the block size limits.