Topic: Bitcoin depletion? (Read 17491 times)

Nice, necro a 7 year old thread with a question answered 21 million times on this board.

You will just divide it into smaller units. It is currently 0.00000001 and when the need is there to add smaller units, then the

developers will propose this and code it and the full nodes will decide if they want this change. Once they run this new code

changes, the smaller units will be in affect. Some people send bitcoins to burn addresses to decrease the amount of coins

that would exist and to increase it's value.   .... New coins are added every day too.  

There would only be a total of 21M to be created(if Im not mistaken). The question in here is what would happen when the total count reaches its limit.

If Bitcoins become wildly popular, and the money supply in the aggregate becomes worth 1 billion USD, then every 10 nanobits (10 nanobits being the smallest resolution possible with the current scheme) will be worth only 0.0000004761 $USD. 1 USD = 0.021 Bitcoins, or 1 Bitcoin = $47.62

If Bitcoins become worth 100 billion USD, then every 10 nanobits will be worth 0.0000476 USD. This is still only 1/210th of a cent. There is still plenty of resolution here, even without extending the precision. 1 USD = 0.00021 Bitcoins, or 1 Bitcoin = $4762

In short, we are a looooooong way away from this becoming anywhere near a problem. It will be a good problem to have

Minor note:  Demand isn't 15-20 billion.  There's never been a request to IANA that met it's predefined guidelines that got denied, and there's still a couple subnets left.  We've got a bit to grow to still hit the hard limit of IPv4.  Still, your point is valid, just felt like throwing that out there.

If there were 8 billion people on the planet and each of them were given an equal share of the 21M BitCoins, each person would have 262500 indivisible BitCoin units.

Doesn't sound a lot especially as Nenolod will have over 85,000 X 100000000 of those indivisible units from the outset.

I'm pretty sure that if needed, the bitcoin protocol and application could be changed to support arbitrary precision arithmetic. Which makes depletion impossible as long as there are parties interested in using bitcoin.

While RFC1149 started out as a joke, it has become semi-serious as a basis for very long-range extensions of the internet to places like Mars and other planets in the Solar System.  When IP packets take on the order of hours for transmittal between nodes on the network, you have to implement some slightly different strategies for dealing with the packets.  This particular RFC has had a few actual implementations too including with the original topic of the paper, carrier pigeons.  Sometimes you have to simply look at a problem from a different perspective from time to time.

Hmm..... that gets me thinking for a bit.... how would you "transport" Bitcoins to Mars or other places in the Solar System?  That would have to be something for another thread but something interesting to speculate on.


I'd have to get back to the find gritty details here, but it seems as though with the Credit Default Swaps that caused the current fiscal mess that the world is in right now represented at one time something on the order of about 5 quadrillion dollars worth of debt that had to be unraveled.  With that much money outstanding in the form of debts of debts of debts and watching that kind of Ponzi scheme collapse, I'm surprised that more wasn't taken out when it collapsed.  Any wonder that whole countries (Greece, as an example) are being wiped out economically?  I just hope that California hangs in there before some sanity takes over again.  The trillion dollars spent by the U.S. Congress at the end of the Bush administration was just to make sure that there would still be a financial center in New York at the end of this year and to keep the whole thing from collapsing too quickly.

If the entire world banking system was relying upon bitcoins, I think it would be reasonable to presume that for liquidity purposes a larger number would have to be selected.  Some of these extreme banking practices perhaps wouldn't have to be practiced and maybe there wouldn't have to be huge amounts of cash being moved around the world.

Not every RFC is a standard, "official" or otherwise. Many aren't even proposed or intended to be standards. And RFC1149 was published in 1990. It wasn't one of the "initial standards", it came a long time after ARPANET and a long time after the internet was run by a "bunch of grad students". There's been a joke RFC published every (or almost every; I haven't checked) year since then.

Not Dollars, cents actually, since we are talking about indivisible lowest amount.
There are $829 billion dollars in public circulation (Government does not have to print the bill to say it has it, so if you count the non-circulation money its an order of magnitude more). This makes it 83 trillion cents, or roughly 25 times less then indivisible bitcoin fractions. Very much a comparable number. If you count non-circulating dollars you get roughly the same number give or take factor of 2.

Since I am on a 3rd grade math spree here, another interesting tidbit is that as of today's 11:30pm EST all bitcoins out there (in circulation) are worth US$70,932 according to today's paypal rate at the bitcoinmarket.com provided these bitcoins all are still intact (and we know for sure thats not so, see other posts from today). Anyone surprised at this number?

Agreed; one reason the Internet has been so successful is precisely because it offers resistance against strong centralized control. Anyone can read the views of anyone else and have access to such a wide range information, anywhere in the world.

They will try, I don't doubt it, but I hope people see the value in a decentralized currency remaining free of centralized control, especially control by people who probably won't even understand the point and will only believe in whatever propaganda they are told.

If bitcoins are being used for transactions involving the equivalent of millions or even billions of dollars world wide, I certainly think that it would involve some very high level discussions and certainly be a topic of discussion at something like a G20 summit.  Perhaps how to kill the concept or something nefarious, but it would at least be brought up.

The same thing could be said about ARPANET, where the initial standards were established with what was a bunch of grad students on their "free time".  How else do you think the IP over avian carrier protocol (RFC 1149) ever got through as an official RFC standard?

The internet in general has resisted strong government interference, even from strong autocratic governments like the People's Republic of China and the Islamic Republic of Iran.  I would imagine that Bitcoins could offer a similar resistance from strong government take over if it is robustly designed.

You do make a decent point about the IPv4 exhaustion limit. I believe Bitcoins have a total divisible count of  2.1 quadrillion (someone correct me if I'm wrong), so it's quite a bit finer than IPv4, but yes, there is still conceivably a precision limit. I suppose the precision could be increased at that point.

I hope the second paragraph was a joke though. Major heads of state discussing the future of Bitcoin? The whole point is that it doesn't fall under state control. Those guys still print the Internet and would probably see Bitcoin as a tool of terrorism. The US DoJ has digital currencies listed as a "major threat".

The 2 decimal point limit is just the client. It's 21,000,000.00000000 that the system can support.

So 0.00000001 is a unit just like 21000000 is.  So if you remove the decimal point, you have 2,100,000,000,000,000 units possible in the entire system or 2.1 quadrillion units possible. So if you think about it without the decimal point, the number is actually much larger than it seems. This is the actual size the system supports. It only goes to 2 decimal points in the client currently. Ask yourself, are there 2.1 quadrillion dollars in circulation in the USA or even all the countries of the world currency combined?

Precisely what I was thinking. Anyone has data on the real money depletion rates? This might give us an idea of a best-case scenario. I say best case because after 20+ years of being in IT I know for sure that bitrot is orders of magnitude faster then any chemical or biological process if it could be compared.

BTW, we really NEED that wallet backup capability talked about in the tech section of the forum.

Perhaps we can assume that the rate at which Bitcoins are accidentally deleted is sort of proportional to the number in existence. So we start with 21,000,000 and it halves every x years, until after about 50x years there's .00000001 Bitcoin left.

The question is whether x is so large that we don't have to care about it. But x is certainly finite and not astronomically large; it's not like trying to count the atoms in the universe or anything.

Not quite sure I follow you. A lot of bitcoins can be destroyed in one accident: it takes one wealthy individual losing his stash one way or another. I bet these will come again and again, fairly predictably. All I am saying is that we could end up with too few bitcoins for them to be useful eventually. I am not convinced this "eventually" is as far away in the future as some might think.

As far as board searches go, I do use them. But there is also a place for a healthy discussion, and people who are not interested in a particular one can easily skip it  

If it really becomes an issue (which I really doubt), the client can be updated to support more precision. Everyone would need to update, but it should be possible to switch to the new system smoothly and gradually.

Well, each new Bitcoin user and each lost Bitcoin just adds value to the currency. When coin generation is complete, the currency can only deflate from there.

If EVERY Bitcoin is somehow deleted, we can just restart the whole block generation process.

I really wouldn't want any government messing with Bitcoins.

Probably many people do, but you wouldn't know because they don't post questions.