Why do so many newer coins have such high coin supplies?

[Bizmark13]

I've noticed that along with Bitcoin, the earliest altcoins all have relatively low total coin supplies. Bitcoin, Namecoin, Ixcoin, and I0coin all have 21 million coins. Litecoin has 84 million. Peercoin, Primecoin, Tenebrix, and Fairbrix have supplies that are technically unlimited however the rate of inflation is low enough that Peercoin currently only has 22 million coins and Primecoin has about 8 million. I couldn't find any numbers for TBX and FBX but I think they have the same thing going on.

Feathercoin has 336 million total coins - exactly four times Litecoin's supply and Freicoin has 100 million. According to this article, BBQcoin has a total coin supply of 88 million although I get different numbers elsewhere. Terracoin has 42 million. All four coins were launched after Litecoin.

Then fast forward to late 2013-2014 and suddenly coin supplies start to go up dramatically. Dogecoin has 100 billion and is technically unlimited. Kittehcoin has 100 billion too. Many of the scrypt clones that appeared during this time (e.g. Flappycoin) had very high coin supplies. NXT has 1 billion coins as well as most of its clones. Both NEM and Qora have ~10 billion. Then there are coins like Pennies/CENT and Colossuscoin which had hundreds of billions and sometimes even trillions of coins.

Auroracoin and Darkcoin buck the trend as both only have ~21 million coins. Ethereum and Counterparty also have smaller coin supplies too. Bytecoin has a high-ish supply while Monero's is quite small in comparision so it's really more of a general trend than a strict rule.

Somewhat relevant (notice how many older coins there are between Freicoin and Bitcoin at the bottom of the chart):

[NeuroticFish]

Just a guess: bitcoin is designed to be rare. Rare means (very? too?) expensive. Some others thought "why not just be a simple, people's currency?" and for a working currency, its value should be, I don't know, somewhere between 1 cent and 10 USD, I think. (Yeah, the big problem is the same on each coin: it needs mass adoption to become a currency)

Some others have missed all the points and just made the "money" flow 

[sgk]

In my personal opinion, total supply is of less importance for any digital currency.

The main reason being that they're perfectly divisible to infinite digits. Bitcoin is divisible till 8th digit after decimal point but it is possible to alter the code in future if the total supply is not enough for the wider distribution; so effectively we'll be using mBTC, then uBTC and so on.

These are not physical currency bills.

[picolo]

I've noticed that along with Bitcoin, the earliest altcoins all have relatively low total coin supplies. Bitcoin, Namecoin, Ixcoin, and I0coin all have 21 million coins. Litecoin has 84 million. Peercoin, Primecoin, Tenebrix, and Fairbrix have supplies that are technically unlimited however the rate of inflation is low enough that Peercoin currently only has 22 million coins and Primecoin has about 8 million. I couldn't find any numbers for TBX and FBX but I think they have the same thing going on.

Feathercoin has 336 million total coins - exactly four times Litecoin's supply and Freicoin has 100 million. According to this article, BBQcoin has a total coin supply of 88 million although I get different numbers elsewhere. Terracoin has 42 million. All four coins were launched after Litecoin.

Then fast forward to late 2013-2014 and suddenly coin supplies start to go up dramatically. Dogecoin has 100 billion and is technically unlimited. Kittehcoin has 100 billion too. Many of the scrypt clones that appeared during this time (e.g. Flappycoin) had very high coin supplies. NXT has 1 billion coins as well as most of its clones. Both NEM and Qora have ~10 billion. Then there are coins like Pennies/CENT and Colossuscoin which had hundreds of billions and sometimes even trillions of coins.

Auroracoin and Darkcoin buck the trend as both only have ~21 million coins. Ethereum and Counterparty also have smaller coin supplies too. Bytecoin has a high-ish supply while Monero's is quite small in comparision so it's really more of a general trend than a strict rule.

Somewhat relevant (notice how many older coins there are between Freicoin and Bitcoin at the bottom of the chart):

People prefer dealing with units and tens of units than fraction of a unit.

[MisO69]

Its because of the scam.

You see, when you have billions of coins, chances are the selling price is in single satoshi digits. So with large pre-mines, insta-mines, the devs can sell the coins, even at 1 satoshi, and still profit.

Then rinse/repeat with another billion coin.

[razen489]

Could be also because they dont want to learn from BTC having a problem of going down to BITS or SATOSHIS

[doc12]

In most cases its because of scam, but if the crypto is intended to be a acutal currency its better to have many units because it sucks to deal with floating point units ....

[gentlemand]

Human psychology likes massive numbers, not piddling divisions. Strings of zeroes should be at the end, not the beginning. Anyone who thinks otherwise is clearly a superior being, or not in touch with how the real world operates.

BTC should've launched as bits or satoshis from the offing.

[Indefinitely]

Its because of the scam.

You see, when you have billions of coins, chances are the selling price is in single satoshi digits. So with large pre-mines, insta-mines, the devs can sell the coins, even at 1 satoshi, and still profit.

Then rinse/repeat with another billion coin.

This^, the mass majority of coins with such high max supplies have been, are, and are going to be, scams. This because it simply looks "better" if a dev announces he's going to have a 10% premine/instamine out of a coin that has a 100billion max coin supply and more likely to actually gather a small community, rather than saying he's gonna take a 10% premine/instamine out of a coin that only has a 10million max coin supply(which would instantly put the scamdev on the red alert to most people).

Coins with stupidly large supplies don't quite make sense, as Bitcon itself is divisible to 8 places and more, making having a large coin supply irrelevant.

[nachoig]

This question is totally irrelevant. These numbers are just a convention, just a formality. What is relevant is how and in what rate the supply grows.

BTW, the coin with greatest supply is Pennies: 49,438,791,994,705 (158 times greater than ColossusCoin). Interesting to notice that they cutted the decimal points.
http://cent-pennies.com/blockchain/block_crawler.php

[TaunSew]

A lot of potential buyers look at price only, the same phenomenon occurs with stocks, so you had something like Bitcoin which was $1200 and that convinced many to not even give bitcoin a try as one bitcoin for many people was more than what they had in disposable funds.  There were literally times when people said they were buying Doge, because it was 'cheaper' than Bitcoin, without recognizing the total supply differences!


The reality here is if any alternate takes off then you're in a better positioning persuading people to buy something that is priced at $.50 to $10 than $300 - $1200.

[runpaint]

RonPaulCoin is limited to 2.5 million, Fractalcoin is limited to 1 million, and Unobtanium is limited to 250,000

[thundertoe]

They are designed to put cash in the devs hands usually with large premines or instamines. These type of coins usually are flash pump and dumps basically dead in the water 90 days in.  Coins that have zero premine or block halving instamine schemes even with nice high PoS rates like TEK,HBN,CAP have very low mintage even after 1.5 years.

good info on many coins can be found here:

http://www.devtome.com/doku.php?id=a_massive_investigation_of_instamines_and_fastmines_for_the_top_alt_coins#tekcoin

[Hilux74]

High number of coins coupled with a rapid mining period lets these scam coins explode up the ranks of useless but often referenced websites like coinmarketcap giving them a false sense of legitimacy to 'investors' with potato brains.

[tss]

People prefer dealing with units and tens of units than fraction of a unit.

ask a zimbabwe guy who paid 20 million dollars for his last meal.  i dont think he'll agree.

[Indefinitely]

People prefer dealing with units and tens of units than fraction of a unit.

ask a zimbabwe guy who paid 20 million dollars for his last meal.  i dont think he'll agree.

I prefer dealing with fractions of units(Hence why coins with lower max coin supplies are better aesthetically). It's simpler. As "tss" said, would you rather pay 10million for a meal, or $2.50? I rather pay the $2.50, it's a much smaller number to deal with.

[NeuroticFish]

People prefer dealing with units and tens of units than fraction of a unit.

ask a zimbabwe guy who paid 20 million dollars for his last meal.  i dont think he'll agree.

I prefer dealing with fractions of units(Hence why coins with lower max coin supplies are better aesthetically). It's simpler. As "tss" said, would you rather pay 10million for a meal, or $2.50? I rather pay the $2.50, it's a much smaller number to deal with.

Also 0.01049 BTC looks pretty strange imho. There has to be found "something in the middle".

[Demille]

The reason is they're probably greedy and likely pre-mined the shit out of it for themselves or to give away to promote their shitcoin as that's the only reason people would bother to download a wallet. People don't know what they're doing when they make these coins and have little to no understanding of economics.

Oh, I think there was one crypto that had something just like 42 coins or something. Not sure what happened to it.

[picolo]

People prefer dealing with units and tens of units than fraction of a unit.

ask a zimbabwe guy who paid 20 million dollars for his last meal.  i dont think he'll agree.

I prefer dealing with fractions of units(Hence why coins with lower max coin supplies are better aesthetically). It's simpler. As "tss" said, would you rather pay 10million for a meal, or $2.50? I rather pay the $2.50, it's a much smaller number to deal with.

Also 0.01049 BTC looks pretty strange imho. There has to be found "something in the middle".

You get use to it.

[nachoig]

People are confusing scarcity with rarity.

Scarcity is about having limited quantity. You can have Bitcoin with 21 million of bitcoins, or an altcoin with 1 trillion of coins and the same market cap, the two are scarce in the same way, because the two have a limited emission and a limited quantity. A unit of a bitcoin will be more rare in terms of numbers or atomic units, but after all, this will be just a cosmetic issue.

The same happens with water: Earth has a lot of water, but even with this, water is scarce, because you can't create water.

And an example of a currency that you don't have to deal with subunits and has a low inflation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_yen