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Topic: Bitcoin amount limit (Read 4139 times)

sr. member
Activity: 308
Merit: 250
July 07, 2011, 09:48:48 AM
#45
Also the people who believe letting coins be mined infinitely mean they all become worth less are misunderstanding something: the coins cost money to mine.  Letting them be mined infinitely just means their value won't exceed their cost to produce.  It's basically like some kind of coin for which we have infinite materlal, but actually turning them into coins is expensive.  Unfortunately I think most on this forum don't understand this so it's not really worth arguing.

Fallacy. As I said elsewhere - I can make tiny statues from my shit that take a really long time to make, will you buy them?

The artificial scarcity imposed by coins with an arbitrary limit gives them their value - no one buying them gives a shit how much it cost you to mine them.
full member
Activity: 372
Merit: 114
July 07, 2011, 01:28:25 AM
#44
I agree with this but realize you are arguing with people who disagree with you.  Bitcoin is not going to change.  Rather than complain about bitcoin which is not going to change for you, look into building something new.  My suggestion is the scheme outlined here, a bitcoin-like currency but where every miner has very precise control over what he will accept in a block, and what he will include in a generation.

http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=24929.20

Also the people who believe letting coins be mined infinitely mean they all become worth less are misunderstanding something: the coins cost money to mine.  Letting them be mined infinitely just means their value won't exceed their cost to produce.  It's basically like some kind of coin for which we have infinite materlal, but actually turning them into coins is expensive.  Unfortunately I think most on this forum don't understand this so it's not really worth arguing.
legendary
Activity: 1680
Merit: 1035
July 07, 2011, 01:16:06 AM
#43
I must buy bitcoins in order to receive them in place of mining them, And this will discourage many.

Please tell me, what is the different between transferring money into PayPal to buy stuff with PayPal, and transferring money into MtGox/TradeHill to buy stuff with Bitcoin?
member
Activity: 84
Merit: 10
Side-stepping the matrix | Bit by bit
July 07, 2011, 12:50:07 AM
#42
This is not a manner of a elementry school, It does not matter if it is "fair" to mine bitcoins, And receive so very many dollars from it. What matters is this limit is idiotic. There is no need for it, And it will cause the eventual demise of bitcoins, For bitcoins will become as any other currency. I must buy bitcoins in order to receive them in place of mining them, And this will discourage many. If this occurs, Bitcoins will become somewhat a stock market, You can buy bitcoins when the value drops, And sell them when it increases, Yet you cannot add to this by mining bitcoins, Thus the use decreases, And the value.

Do you understand why there are countries in tens of trillions of fiat currency debt? Do understand why quantitative easing (i.e. increasing the money supply - to try and mend a system that's beyond repair, no less) devalues a currency? Do you understand what a growing and infinite supply does to the value of a currency? Do you understand what happened to the currencies of the Weimer Republic in the 1920s and Zimbabwe in the last decade?

Do you understand that there are two main people who get into bitcoin? i.e. those who understand the above and want to not only maintain their purchasing power, but improve it with time (nothing idiotic about that); and those who just want to make a quick buck because they heard some people already made shit loads  of money, and even though they don't understand the how or why of the deflationary nature what they're getting into works.

The latter should probably just stick to fiat currency as it already does exactly what they want - offer a limitless supply of money.
legendary
Activity: 1862
Merit: 1105
WalletScrutiny.com
July 06, 2011, 08:16:15 PM
#41
The only reason people are getting involved is because they know that there is a limit. Who in their right mind would invest in something that will be diluted infinitely? The price of bitcoins would still be at $0.001 if there was an infinite supply. An infinite supply mean that no matter the demand, the price is going to be tiny, because there will always be more. The current price is from people speculating on future demand given a finite supply.

Complete bullshit. DamienBlack said it right already but I'm even stronger opposed to that.
If there was a way to grant 50*1.1^time in years btc per person (that is every user would be granted 50btc for 2009, 55 for 2010, ... no matter when he joins), I would be fine with that, too. This mechanism would make bitcoin more of a currency. now it is only a store of value.

i bought at 9$ and i'm not an early adopter with thousands of btc so i value those btc i have much higher than people trade them on mtGox. on the other hand I doubt the btc will survive as a save haven for all of my savings so i'm stuck with some coins neither bold enough to buy more nor to use them at the MtGox rate. A predefined rate of infinite exponential growth would help a lot. With the money being attributed to persons, people would not turn their back to bitcoin knowing they have some fresh coins every year (month/block). unfortunately this reward per person instead of per proof of work doesn't work in an anonymous decentralized system.
jr. member
Activity: 56
Merit: 1
July 06, 2011, 07:10:15 PM
#40

The only reason people are getting involved is because they know that there is a limit. Who in their right mind would invest in something that will be diluted infinitely? The price of bitcoins would still be at $0.001 if there was an infinite supply. An infinite supply mean that no matter the demand, the price is going to be tiny, because there will always be more.

The first is just your opinion (Which is fine), the later is misleading and untrue, because demand could rise with supply, bear human population growing rate in mind.


Yes, you are right. It all depends on the growth rate vs adoption rate I suppose. I guess there could be no limit but it grows really slowly. If it grew linearly, we would almost be in the same position as now, as growth is expected to be exponential in the long term (even if also small). But still, I don't think people would look at small growth, or linear growth the same way they look at a fixed amount. Psychologically speaking, I know I am getting a permanent piece of the pie when I buy/mine bitcoins, and that is why I do it.
member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
GNU is not UNIX
July 06, 2011, 06:18:46 PM
#39
One thing that bothers me about the choice of the 21M top is that if you expect the whole world population to use bitcoins, then only very few people will be able to own even 1 BTC.
It would be better to right shift the decimal point right now, rather than when/if Bitcoine becomes more mainstream.

If they did that though, even though it wouldn't warrant any market change in the slightest, would probably scare a few people who didn't understand it and destabilize the market even more.

Anyone can have their client display whatever (sub) multiple of Bitcoin he wishes. The reference implementation is free software an anyone is welcome to modify it or make one from scratch. Non-programmers can hire a programmer.

Go ahead, stop crying and modify your client and distribute a patch.


It wouldn't work well unless everyone was using the same standard.

How do you plan to do that?. Bitcoin is decentralized. It's naive to assume you can get clients to follow a same standard regarding the user interface. Even regarding the protocol, there will be broken implementations. You can't but invite people to use the denomination of your preference.

The only reason people are getting involved is because they know that there is a limit. Who in their right mind would invest in something that will be diluted infinitely? The price of bitcoins would still be at $0.001 if there was an infinite supply. An infinite supply mean that no matter the demand, the price is going to be tiny, because there will always be more.

The first is just your opinion (Which is fine), the later is misleading and untrue, because demand could rise with supply, bear human population growing rate in mind.
jr. member
Activity: 56
Merit: 1
July 06, 2011, 06:06:49 PM
#38
This is not a manner of a elementry school, It does not matter if it is "fair" to mine bitcoins, And receive so very many dollars from it. What matters is this limit is idiotic. There is no need for it, And it will cause the eventual demise of bitcoins, For bitcoins will become as any other currency. I must buy bitcoins in order to receive them in place of mining them, And this will discourage many. If this occurs, Bitcoins will become somewhat a stock market, You can buy bitcoins when the value drops, And sell them when it increases, Yet you cannot add to this by mining bitcoins, Thus the use decreases, And the value.

The only reason people are getting involved is because they know that there is a limit. Who in their right mind would invest in something that will be diluted infinitely? The price of bitcoins would still be at $0.001 if there was an infinite supply. An infinite supply mean that no matter the demand, the price is going to be tiny, because there will always be more. The current price is from people speculating on future demand given a finite supply.

tl;dr -- No on would invest in bitcoin if there were an infinite amount of them. I know I wouldn't.
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
FIAT LIBERTAS RVAT CAELVM
July 06, 2011, 06:04:57 PM
#37
This is not a manner of a elementry school, It does not matter if it is "fair" to mine bitcoins, And receive so very many dollars from it. What matters is this limit is idiotic. There is no need for it, And it will cause the eventual demise of bitcoins, For bitcoins will become as any other currency. I must buy bitcoins in order to receive them in place of mining them, And this will discourage many. If this occurs, Bitcoins will become somewhat a stock market, You can buy bitcoins when the value drops, And sell them when it increases, Yet you cannot add to this by mining bitcoins, Thus the use decreases, And the value.

The idea is not to make a stock exchange, but a currency. People don't whine about not being able to print dollars (or pound notes), they just do a job to get some.
newbie
Activity: 15
Merit: 0
July 06, 2011, 06:02:19 PM
#36
Your client will reject any block chain that doesn't conform to the rules as it understands them - so a massive change in rules will simply fork the blockchain into two different chains, obviously with the most popular chain being the one people use but it's entirely plausible to end up with two distinct networks that started out as Bitcoin itself.

Regarding forking the block chain, this is interesting. Would the new chain always start at zero? could it be used as a more local version of a currency? Would it have an independent supply rate?

If you have some reference to point me to I would appreciate that!

Go to the developer forum and you'll see some guy is offering Bitcoins to developers to help him start up his own blockchain and corresponding client, and miners to help him mine the new currency (he calls it Groupcoin).  So anyone can do it, but just because you can doesn't mean they'll be worth anything.  Bitcoin is worth something because it has a large number of people on board.  People have a hard time understanding this.  I think the Groupcoin founder believes he's going to get rich and spread wealth to all the developers who help him (and some are).  But before you invest your hard-earned Bitcoins in Groupcoins, remember that Bitcoin is worth something because of the number of people who use it, not because of some secure P2P accounting system, brilliant though it may be.

This is exactly what will occur to bitcoins, Once the limit is reach the amount of users will drop, The places of which accept bitcoins will also decrease, And the value will drop.
newbie
Activity: 15
Merit: 0
July 06, 2011, 05:59:43 PM
#35
This is not a manner of a elementry school, It does not matter if it is "fair" to mine bitcoins, And receive so very many dollars from it. What matters is this limit is idiotic. There is no need for it, And it will cause the eventual demise of bitcoins, For bitcoins will become as any other currency. I must buy bitcoins in order to receive them in place of mining them, And this will discourage many. If this occurs, Bitcoins will become somewhat a stock market, You can buy bitcoins when the value drops, And sell them when it increases, Yet you cannot add to this by mining bitcoins, Thus the use decreases, And the value.
legendary
Activity: 1764
Merit: 1015
July 06, 2011, 01:39:18 AM
#34
Why would the code of bitcoins be so of which limits the total amount, Or what ever is causing this to be so. Would a market of bitcoins with an infinite amount of possible bitcoins not be better? Wallstreet flucuates, Yet it hold to a limitless currency. There is no pre-set limit to an currency of any country. Something my be bought for a trillion dollars, Why should something not be able to be bought for a trillion bitcoins?
Bitcoins are divisible to infinity. Technically you can divide 1 Bitcoin between millions of people if they ever become worth that much.
full member
Activity: 218
Merit: 100
July 06, 2011, 12:19:18 AM
#33
Your client will reject any block chain that doesn't conform to the rules as it understands them - so a massive change in rules will simply fork the blockchain into two different chains, obviously with the most popular chain being the one people use but it's entirely plausible to end up with two distinct networks that started out as Bitcoin itself.

Regarding forking the block chain, this is interesting. Would the new chain always start at zero? could it be used as a more local version of a currency? Would it have an independent supply rate?

If you have some reference to point me to I would appreciate that!

Go to the developer forum and you'll see some guy is offering Bitcoins to developers to help him start up his own blockchain and corresponding client, and miners to help him mine the new currency (he calls it Groupcoin).  So anyone can do it, but just because you can doesn't mean they'll be worth anything.  Bitcoin is worth something because it has a large number of people on board.  People have a hard time understanding this.  I think the Groupcoin founder believes he's going to get rich and spread wealth to all the developers who help him (and some are).  But before you invest your hard-earned Bitcoins in Groupcoins, remember that Bitcoin is worth something because of the number of people who use it, not because of some secure P2P accounting system, brilliant though it may be.
member
Activity: 84
Merit: 10
Side-stepping the matrix | Bit by bit
July 05, 2011, 11:54:47 PM
#32
Why would the code of bitcoins be so of which limits the total amount, Or what ever is causing this to be so. Would a market of bitcoins with an infinite amount of possible bitcoins not be better? Wallstreet flucuates, Yet it hold to a limitless currency. There is no pre-set limit to an currency of any country. Something my be bought for a trillion dollars, Why should something not be able to be bought for a trillion bitcoins?

Um, you want inflation to be built into the system so that something can be bought for 1trn btc? Huh
hero member
Activity: 532
Merit: 500
FIAT LIBERTAS RVAT CAELVM
July 05, 2011, 03:42:53 PM
#31
I think it's safe to assume that if you're smart enough to modify your client to use a different base unit, you have the processing power to do a quick decimal conversion.
newbie
Activity: 14
Merit: 0
July 05, 2011, 03:39:45 PM
#30
One thing that bothers me about the choice of the 21M top is that if you expect the whole world population to use bitcoins, then only very few people will be able to own even 1 BTC.
It would be better to right shift the decimal point right now, rather than when/if Bitcoine becomes more mainstream.

If they did that though, even though it wouldn't warrant any market change in the slightest, would probably scare a few people who didn't understand it and destabilize the market even more.

Anyone can have their client display whatever (sub) multiple of Bitcoin he wishes. The reference implementation is free software an anyone is welcome to modify it or make one from scratch. Non-programmers can hire a programmer.

Go ahead, stop crying and modify your client and distribute a patch.


It wouldn't work well unless everyone was using the same standard.
member
Activity: 70
Merit: 10
GNU is not UNIX
July 05, 2011, 02:17:20 PM
#29
Anyone can have their client display whatever (sub) multiple of Bitcoin he wishes. The reference implementation is free software an anyone is welcome to modify it or make one from scratch. Non-programmers can hire a programmer.

Go ahead, stop crying and modify your client and distribute a patch.
newbie
Activity: 41
Merit: 0
July 05, 2011, 01:42:39 PM
#28
One thing that bothers me about the choice of the 21M top is that if you expect the whole world population to use bitcoins, then only very few people will be able to own even 1 BTC.
It would be better to right shift the decimal point right now, rather than when/if Bitcoine becomes more mainstream.
donator
Activity: 826
Merit: 1060
July 05, 2011, 07:42:12 AM
#27
The FAQ says otherwise
Fixed. As others have pointed out, the reference to "shifting the decimal point" was metaphorical.
member
Activity: 102
Merit: 10
July 05, 2011, 04:47:12 AM
#26
It's more of a display thing. If people don't want to pay .00000015 BTC for a drink, they can pay 15 Satoshis (That sounds about right, by the way, for an outrageously priced bar drink;) )

I think eventually there will be a Big Mac index, where the price of a Big Mac will fluctuate between 1.5 and 1.8 Satoshis.  Smiley

Read: Everything will be denominated in Big Macs!
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