Topic: 1BR: Should the block reward be 50 BTC for ages? - page 3. (Read 6005 times)

EXACTLY:

The one thing that caught my attention (and held ever since) back in june 2011 is the statement:  "There will never be more then 21M bitcoins.....ever".  I suggest if you get a bunch to put them offline and revisit them in a couple years!!

Ahhhh, it'll be fine. 

There is the never-ending block chain bloat to consider.

Recycling unused coins is dangerous. No matter how it's implemented, people won't feel safe knowing that their savings could vanish because they haven't moved them around. Not to mention, there is no reason to do it - because there is no need to compensate for lost coins. We can simply divide existing bitcoins further, indefinitely.

That may be true today, but once ASIC's are out and difficulty increases 10-fold, the supercomputers go from making a difference in difficulty to making a scratch.  Supercomputers just aren't well suited for Bitcoin mining compared to a dedicated ASIC processor.

Personally, I think that the reward as a fraction of the current amount of coins should remain constant. A slow (~0.1%) inflation per year would be healthy to compensate for permanently lost coins. Of course if a procedure for recycling coins that haven't been used in a long time was implemented that would not be needed.

This is a weakness of Bitcoin btw. USA government has an option to mine bitcoin with a lot of power to raise difficulty. And repeat it after difficulty drops to previous level.

Well, besides the fact that transactions will take 20 times longer to confirm for 2016 blocks (10 months).  

Well Bitcoin is what a majority (preferrably a near consensus super majority) say it is.  There already has been one hard fork to the protocol.  The fork which is known as Bitcoin is what people say it is.  It is just for something as controversial as changing the minting rate it is unlikely you will ever get enough of a consensus to pull it off.

The worst case scenario would be two incompatible forks both supported by a sizable fraction of the bitcoin "community" (merchants, exchanges, developers, miners, users).   The confusion and chaos would likely undermine both chains.

Precisely.

No one has to do anything in Bitcoin. If miners start using another algo that wouldn't be Bitcoin anymore and they'd simply make a hard fork. Who ever is left would continue using Bitcoin as if nothing happened.

This.  Good, bad, or ugly you will never get the kind of consensus necessary to make just a drastic change to the Bitcoin network.  To even have a shot at it you would need to convince the developers of all the major wallets, a super majority of miners, a super majority of merchants, essentially all major exchanges, and convince at least a significant fraction of normal users.

It simply will never happen.  Every couple week/months/years someone will say "what if we x?" you never will be able to.  The current protocol has momentum and any miners of an alt-fork runs the very real risk they end up with lots of completely worthless coins while miners who stay on the current fork will see their difficulty fall and their revenue rise.

An alt-chain is possible.  I would also point out that an alt-chain doesn't need to start at a genesis block of 0.  You could for example take the current Bitcoin balances at block 210,000 and make your alt-coin start with that.  However changing something are core as the minting rate simply isn't going to happen so those who want it to  should start an alt-coin.

The only scenarios I see a permanent hard fork being plausible would be:
a) to replace ECDSA based addresses because they are cryptographically flawed.
b) to extend the number of digits because 1 satoshi is worth more than $0.10 USD in buying power (or equivalent).
c) to change the hashing algorithm because SHA-256 is cryptographically flawed.
d) to incorporate post-quantum cryptography because QC presents a credible risk.
e) some other catastrophic flaw in the protocol which simply must be changed to avoid the entire system failing

People who are afraid of the reward halving don't really technically know how all the system works and why it's necessary to decrease the reward.

If the people who supply the value (merchants not miners) want different money they can get it whether they want EUR, Bitcoin, or modified Bitcoin. The people who mint the coins do it for us because we pay them to.

It seems to me that u r right. So there is no way to change Bitcoin. Any changes will likely lead to a fork.

I understand that, but as far as a store of value, it would never compete with Bitcoin, which doesn't inflate at all.  And if people aren't using it as a store of value, they aren't holding it.  And if people aren't holding it, they don't use it.  And if people don't hold or use it, it becomes worthless.

No they don't.

Say you did fork Bitcoin, and 95% of miners moved over to this new blockchain so they could be paid 50 BTC forever.

Now, 95% of non-miners stay with the real Bitcoin blockchain, and 5% of miners.

So 95% of miners are now mining this worthless fork that no one is actually using for transactions, because non-miners are still using the real Bitcoin blockchain instead.  The price drops on said worthless fork because no one is using it, and therefore no one wants it.  It starts to see values along the lines of Solidcoin when compared with real Bitcoins.

Meanwhile, the 5% of miners who stayed with the original Bitcoin blockchain are still happily mining along and keeping transactions moving along, the currency still has value, and people are still making transactions with it.

There's no requirement for everyone to follow suit if a new version of Bitcoin is released.

Every single day inflation rate will go down in this case, so it's like it is now but without capped grand total.

If miners modify the algo then the others have to do the same.

Many people are holding on to Bitcoins BECAUSE they don't inflate.  If you introduce infinite inflation, expect people to drop them like hot potatoes, and the value of them to drop equally fast.

Miners would actually make much less per block in terms of dollars if the block reward was sustained at 50 BTC indefinitely, because the price of BTC would drop so much once people knew they would be inflated forever.