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

[RodeoX]

So much misunderstanding about what the foundation is and does.

[coindozer7]

That's totally impossible!!
Bitcoin Foundation can't able to do that.
First, it's not a centralized foundation and second it's just impossible for anyone to remove the 21M limitation.

[Mudd]

So much misunderstanding about what the foundation is and does.

What do they do apart from cause controversy exactly?

[designfail]

So most of the optimistic expectations are coming from the assumption that the existing fragile hashpower disposition will be forever: 20%-ish for BTCGuild, 35%-ish for CEX.io, 5%-ish for Slush pool, the rest 40% for "unknown sources", etc. However, in case of global BTC adoption it is easy for major players to possess up to 99% of the whole network and leave the remaining 1% for Slush+CexIO+BTCGuild+the rest. And not necessarily that possessing 99% of the whole network will cause massive double spending. They will just keep the network with all the nodes. Of course, the "original" or "true" BTC fork will be alive and running on the garage ASICs, and used for minor bar tiping or something like that.

This is similar to gold rush in California: amateurs with shovels are gone since shoveling is no longer profitable; big cartels with heavy machinery are now doing the mining, capturing new territories and setting new rules of the game.

[designfail]

That's totally impossible!!
Bitcoin Foundation can't able to do that.
First, it's not a centralized foundation and second it's just impossible for anyone to remove the 21M limitation.

The Foundation is the first step towards BTC centralization. It's like: if you need international adoption and investors, you need centralization and controlled inflation. No more "to da moon" -kinda stuff

[jc01480]

Much confusion
Many disingenuous
Such fail

[designfail]

Much confusion
Many disingenuous
Such fail

Personally I am not buying this. I want the replay from somebody who is grown up.

[Raize]

If this ever happens, Satoshi will come back, form a new dev team that will fork based on the most recent code WITH the limitation, and ensure there are enough funds to keep them going for a limited time frame from his own stash. The BCF fork will die within a few months to a year.

[designfail]

Who is gonna mine then? The hashingpower cannot grow exponentially indefinitely. We are going to hit a plateau at some point since there is no free energy in this world.

[twiifm]

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.

Good explanation.  As the cost to mine increases the mining corporations will naturally consolidate until there are only a few mining corporation similar to every other business like utilities, ISPs, telcos, banks etc..

The paradox is that in order to profit these few mining corps need to increase the bitcoin price to keep their margins.  But if BTC increase less people would want to use it as currency.  It'll be speculated til the price gets where majority want to take profit then the bubble would collapse

[redwhitenblue]

The Bitcoin Foundation cannot simply change Bitcoin.

They are able to propose a change to the code of Bitcoin, however the miners must approve the changes in order for it to be adopted.

In the past the changes have been deemed "a good idea" and "good for bitcoin" so they have been approved by the miners (via a hardfork in the blockchain)

[TheGambler]

The Bitcoin Foundation cannot simply change Bitcoin.

They are able to propose a change to the code of Bitcoin, however the miners must approve the changes in order for it to be adopted.

In the past the changes have been deemed "a good idea" and "good for bitcoin" so they have been approved by the miners (via a hardfork in the blockchain)

How many miners would have to agree?
The main pool owners? Miners themselves?

[fran2k]

Bitcoin will fork, price will crash. Forget about it.

[RodeoX]

We just voted. There will now be 22million BTC. Also we voted to change the name to "electric carrots" or ELC.
 

[cr1776]

The Bitcoin Foundation cannot simply change Bitcoin.

They are able to propose a change to the code of Bitcoin, however the miners must approve the changes in order for it to be adopted.

In the past the changes have been deemed "a good idea" and "good for bitcoin" so they have been approved by the miners (via a hardfork in the blockchain)

How many miners would have to agree?
The main pool owners? Miners themselves?

It isn't a question of a vote or how many people would have to agree, there would be a hard fork. 

Something called bitcoin with a 21 million coins limit would continue, and this new coin called something like inflate-a-coin where there was no limit to the number of coins would be created.

Everyone who owned bitcoin at the time of the hard fork would also own the same number of coins on the inflate-a-coin fork.  Many would sell their coins on the inflate-a-coin (IAC) fork causing the IAC price to drop and buy something that won't lose value each year, like bitcoin. 

In theory, EVERYONE could agree to switch to the IAC fork.  In practice, a change like this would get very little support.

This type of thread comes up quite often, it would be nice if someone just implemented some of these ideas and got them out of the way.  Then the answer would be "look at X-coin" and see how it did in reality.  Look at Freicoin for one example where the currency loses just under 5% of its value each year (akin to inflating it away).  People might use it to transact, but who is going to use it as a store of value when there is another option?  Likewise, IAC would be losing value each year.  Some people might like that, most would realize that it is stupid to keep something that is losing value each year, so the people who were knowledgable would stick with the bitcoin fork, others would go with the IAC fork.

[leopard2]

Excellent question

Maybe this is one of the ideas that government think tanks come up with, outlaw "evil deflationary" cryptos?

Removing the limitation broke DOGE's back! It would probably lead to a run on the next best alternative SHA256 currency, whatever that is.

[Ron~Popeil]

Excellent question

Maybe this is one of the ideas that government think tanks come up with, outlaw "evil deflationary" cryptos?

Removing the limitation broke DOGE's back! It would probably lead to a run on the next best alternative SHA256 currency, whatever that is.

Good luck to them if they tried to enforce something like that.

[TEDmachine]

in this case the history will repeats 

[farlack]

The community would never allow it. Part of the sheer brilliance of the protocol is that it requires consensus.

Well the protocol is brilliant, I agree.. But seeing as we're what.. 100k strong as a userbase.. By the time big banks decide to do this, it will be at what... 100 million? 3 billion?


Switch your protocol, or use a chain only 100k people use.

Lets see what you choose.

[RodeoX]

It seems to keep getting lost in this thread. But this is never going to happen and the bitcoin foundation has zero ability to change the protocol. That's all.