What if someday Bitcoin Foundation votes to remove 21M limitation?

[bryant.coleman]

I am not sure whether they can remove the 21 million limitation or not. But if they remove it, then it will badly affect the reputation of the currency. Once they increases the limit, then nothing guarantees you that they will not do it every now and then.

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[f12ej57kk]

then the price of bitcoin  reduce

[apxu]

There would be 2 forks

Yes.

, and most likely, the majority would stay on the original chain

Not sure.

Anyway, bitcoin (and all alt-coins) is voluntary currencies.
You always have a right use original bitcoin core or switch to bitcoin-v2.0

[TheGambler]

I am not sure whether they can remove the 21 million limitation or not. But if they remove it, then it will badly affect the reputation of the currency. Once they increases the limit, then nothing guarantees you that they will not do it every now and then.

Exactly right...
I can't see this happening and I think it definitely should not. Once there is enough in circulation thats it...it'll be nothing but success from there onward (my opinion).

[bryant.coleman]

Exactly right...
I can't see this happening and I think it definitely should not. Once there is enough in circulation thats it...it'll be nothing but success from there onward (my opinion).

One of the major advantages with Bitcoin is protection against inflation. If we removes the limits, then the currency will no longer be guarded against inflation and will become similar to any other fiat currency.

[TheGambler]

Exactly right...
I can't see this happening and I think it definitely should not. Once there is enough in circulation thats it...it'll be nothing but success from there onward (my opinion).

One of the major advantages with Bitcoin is protection against inflation. If we removes the limits, then the currency will no longer be guarded against inflation and will become similar to any other fiat currency.

Hopefully people are bright enough to see this. If you inflate the currency you've ruined the last 4/5 years of bitcoins hard earned growth. Ruined one of it's first promises to miners and traders.

It won't happen

[Aswan]

Say, at some point big banks and hedge funds make an agreement with core developers to remove the limitation of 21M and have the foundation vote for this?
Is it possible in theory and on practice?

We would simply keep using bitcoin instead of their incompatible altcoin

[ab8989]

It is the miners who decide and if the economics of mining get too poor without block rewards that they are contemplating closing the shop they do have incentive to change things so that block rewards continue. It will mean a fork but do you really think that any meaningful percentage of miners will stay on the chain that is uneconomical to mine or do they also join the majority on the more popular chain that also keeps handing them bitcoins? The change to happen in the first place would of course need an agreed consensus of >51% of miners that they do want to change.

Also I think the opinion that the dent in reputation of bitcoin will cause everybody to move to an altcoin is the most silly opinion of them all. Which altcoin? You mean some of the thousand different altcoins? If there for some weird reason could be a selection of only one altcoin that everybody would switch to that also means practically the same thing as increasing the supply of bitcoins. What reason there would be to believe that if this ever happens that there would not be a second change from the first altcoin to some second altcoin. This in my opinion would dent the reputation of all cryptocurrencies irreparably. Changing bitcoin protocol would dent the reputation of bitcoin for sure, but the alternative approaches like changing to some altcoin are much are worse for the overall reputation and so the incentive of everybody in bitcoin economy would be to show happy face to the change and hope the dent do not last for long.

It is even possible that there is no dent at all and with some spin in marketing the general public does not even notice or agree that there was any change at all. The marketing message could be something like: "There was an emerging disaster looming in bitcoin as there would have been a hugely disruptive change deep down in insignificant details in bitcoin halving the block rewards but thanks to heroic effort of tireless developers and majority of bitcoin miners the looming threat was found early and thwarted and bitcoin will continue to work exactly as it has previously worked with no perilous and disastreous changes like block reward halving. Praise the lord, amen."

Actually I have the opinion that there is some nonzero probability of change of bitcoin protocol at some point in future.

[freebitcoins4u]

then everyone will move to the next best altcoin

[Kazimir]

1. The Bitcoin Foundation has nothing to do with this. The name may be misleading, they merely try to represent the Bitcoin community in order to improve communication with governments, educating them about Bitcoin, and help generating broader acceptance of Bitcoin. But essentially it's just a random group of people. They have no more saying on the Bitcoin software, protocol, or ecosystem than you or me.

2. In case some developer (which developers would that be, exactly? the ones behind Armory? or Multibit? or Bitcoin-Qt? or Electrum? or blockchain.info? or all the Android an iOS apps? etc) decides they want to change the 21M limit, they can't just do it and expect the world to agree. It would simply cause a fork and the rest of the world would stick with the original Bitcoin protocol. They can propose a change, discuss with the rest of the Bitcoin world, and if (and ONLY if) the majority of all users worldwide decide it's a change for the better, such a development would be accepted.

[Farmer17]

Say, at some point big banks and hedge funds make an agreement with core developers to remove the limitation of 21M and have the foundation vote for this?
Is it possible in theory and on practice?

The Bitcoin Foundation could hark-fork it, but it will be just an altcoin.

[zimmah]

Say, at some point big banks and hedge funds make an agreement with core developers to remove the limitation of 21M and have the foundation vote for this?
Is it possible in theory and on practice?

No, the bitcoin foundation can't remove the limitations. They would need majority support from most of the nodes and miners. It will not happen.

[Light]

So who can remove the limitation?

No single entity would have enough mining power to force a change at this point in time. When a change is suggested by the developers, nodes and miners have a choice to either accept the change or not. Depending on what the majority do, that is what is considered to be the real fork and what the others do will be considered an alternate chain. This hasn't happened thus far - so far the developers haven't placed any crazy/radical new ideas into the code so miners and nodes haven't had to think too hard about what they should support. But you can bet your bottom dollar that even if a malicious entity popped up people would stop using that chain and instead follow the other one, effectively rendering the chain run by the nefarious entity useless.

[Eri]

It is the miners who decide and if the economics of mining get too poor without block rewards that they are contemplating closing the shop they do have incentive to change things so that block rewards continue.

they control nothing, other non evil miners would step in and start mining, and things would continue, the lack of the other miners would reduce difficulty.

what your missing and not understanding is that before asics we had this issue on a daily basis. miners had a small profit margin and as the profit went to 0 for some of them they simply stopped mining. the rest who still saw profit kept mining. even now there are differences in profit for different miners. even if some are forced out there will be others who arnt. as miners leave the profit for others will go up. it ALWAYS reaches a natural balance.



as a few others mentioned, nobody can force this change. it would just make a fork which everyone would ignore. if they dont adopt the change then the change doesnt matter.

[ab8989]

they control nothing, other non evil miners would step in and start mining, and things would continue, the lack of the other miners would reduce difficulty.

what your missing and not understanding is that before asics we had this issue on a daily basis. miners had a small profit margin and as the profit went to 0 for some of them they simply stopped mining. the rest who still saw profit kept mining. even now there are differences in profit for different miners. even if some are forced out there will be others who arnt. as miners leave the profit for others will go up. it ALWAYS reaches a natural balance.

The situation was very different when mining was done with one guy with one GPU that he switched to mining whenever he was not playing games on the computer. They could switch on and off at whim.

Things are developing fast into the direction that only profitable mining is going to be done in some few places on planet where electricity is cheap and they have the most bleeding edge HW running on huge datacentres. Whenever that becomes unprofitable there is nobody to step up in near term to fill the gap so that bitcoin economy as a whole that needs the mining can continue uninterrupted. There is going to be huge drop in profitability at the moment when block rewards cease to exist. At that moment all the mining gear at individual homes not in the datacentres has been obsoleted long ago and have been collecting dust at some attic for along time.

If somebody closes datacentres they need to be cleared from the equipment so that the facilities can be rented for some other use and without revenue from block rewards there is not enough money to go around for anybody rebuild the datacentres back up. They do not sit idle waiting if mining will become profitable in the future. They need to run constantly to pay the rent or be dismantled.

Or probably it actually works so that some will quit and some will stay and in this case mining will be concentrated to much fewer hands and getting the 51% will be very easy buying unprofitable mining datacentres from bankruptcies and the one reason to buy them is getting 51% to some one persons hands.

I believe keeping the mining profitable without any significant drop is actually very much in the interest of bitcoin economy as a whole to prevent any huge datacentres ever becoming available to the market for a ridiculously low price as that would be a disaster much bigger than anything else.

[TheGambler]

So who can remove the limitation?

No single entity would have enough mining power to force a change at this point in time. When a change is suggested by the developers, nodes and miners have a choice to either accept the change or not. Depending on what the majority do, that is what is considered to be the real fork and what the others do will be considered an alternate chain. This hasn't happened thus far - so far the developers haven't placed any crazy/radical new ideas into the code so miners and nodes haven't had to think too hard about what they should support. But you can bet your bottom dollar that even if a malicious entity popped up people would stop using that chain and instead follow the other one, effectively rendering the chain run by the nefarious entity useless.

Well that's good enough for me....if the limitation doesn't change that's 100% fine with myself and I'm sure 95%+ of investors

[boymilk]

Bitcoin would fork. Those who had coins before the fork would find their coins existing on both chains. Both "Bitcoins" would be competing against each other and their communities would consider the other one to be an illegitimate imposter. This could become a permanent thing; i.e. an equilibrium could be reached and the two Bitcoins could co-exist side by side or an overwhelming majority of miners might switch to one fork and it would eventually be declared the winner and therefore the "true" Bitcoin.

[aeternum.in]

The foundations votes don't count for anything. The miners are the ones that make the decisions. They vote with their hash power. The foundation is powerless to force anyone to do anything. They have to convince the majority stake miners to switch, and of course- why would they? It's not in their economic interest to do so. Thus- we will never remove the 21M limit. :-)

[whtchocla7e]

Miners this and miners that.... And who owns the majority of the hashing power? The evil corporations or the guy with 2  pathetic usb miners in his basement? If you want voting power, you buy it. If you want the control of bitcoin, you buy it.

[TYT]

I don't think the bitcoin foundation has this sort of control over the technology. They're just a seperate group really.