Topic: Bitcoin is NOT mathematically limited to twenty one million bitcoins (Read 2851 times)

I'm sure that some [certain cartel] won't exist and be alive when we reach the point needed to change the units. besides didn't some other [Chinese cartel] already increased the total number by x2 3 weeks ago? I guess if it's their cartel it's all good but when it comes to our cartel it's all stinky right?

You mean there will be that many transactions to be included when considering fees will be one satoshi or even lesser than that also will be possible then ?

Anyways, in next 20 years we can expect massive number of transactions for every block and hence we can expect miners to earn better. If these are the cases then there will be no meaning to think about having unlimited bitcoins just for the reason making miners profitable with one assured bitcoins with every new block.

Mind blown.

 

Exactly. So far the growth of Bitcoin relative to fiat has always offset the loss of declining block rewards - and then some. Assuming that Bitcoin is still alive and kicking in 15 years this trend is likely to continue. Worst case the Bitcoin fiat price can't keep up with the block reward halving, in which case less electricity will be spent on mining. But as long as Bitcoin exists, mining will always find a profitable optimum of more or less hashpower. That's the beauty of it.



Duuude. So what you're saying is that Bitcoin is NOT grammatically limited to the name Bitcoin? :O

On a related note bitcoin is NOT limited to being called bitcoin. Just a few tiny tweaks and it could be called bitloin. 

Woah. Think about that! 

There seem to be quite a few people in the thread repeating the same general theme:


But RoftheN hits the nail on the head with this:


This couldn't be more right.  People trying to change the cap wouldn't be some foregone conclusion.  The only way you can change the supply is a hardfork and a hardfork means there will always be a 21 million supply chain we could continue using.  One would naturally assume that the chain with the raised supply and the money printing would be a minority fork.  But even if it wasn't and we ended up in the perverse (and highly unlikely) situation that the 21 million supply chain was in the minority, there's still sheer bloody-minded belligerence to consider.  And there are probably always going to be enough of us with such a mindset for that to count for something.  I'd like to think we would continue to breathe life into our preferred chain, even if the odds were stacked against us.

For example, mining is generally the last thing I'd see myself doing in Bitcoin, but if there were ever a situation where the rest of the world went insane and decided to support a chain with a larger supply, even I'd seriously consider ordering some shiny new hardware and pointing it at a pool supporting the real thing.  Whatever happens, it's never going to be unanimous, so it's merely a question of how far you're willing to go to defend your ideals.  Those of you who would dump are free to do that, but my first instinct would be to fight it and trust the market to see sense in due time.  Plus, if they ever did go down the route of money printing, sooner or later, that chain will inevitably crash and burn, no matter how much support it might have.  So I'm certain that, in some form or another, there will always be a 21 million cap.

As we've already established, it's not a mathematical limit, but a principled one.  And in some ways, principles can prove stronger.

Here we need to understand one thing, in next 10 to 20 years, the tx fees to be collected from the transactions included in one block might be summing up more than 50 bitcoins also (the original block reward).

Hence there will be no point of thinking about one bitcoin reward for every block for ever. I do not understand how it will ensure a strong distributed mining community when they are already having enough reasons to be part of bitcoin community.

The day we change the 21 million limit is the day bitcoin becomes valueless. I would divest at least 90% of my coins and move into gold.
Not that this is going to happen.

Currently bitcoin is limited to a total number by the rules of math and code. Yes, if you could get everyone to agree to change the code then the limit could be increased. Hell, if you could get everyone to agree we could change the code so that every block required a cat gif be attached. Literally any part of bitcoin could be changed with enough support, but we assume these things as reasonably core tenets since it seems unlikely for them to change. So the bigger question is why would we ever want to raise the cap?

twenty one million bitcoins ! It may be too much, but in the future, this number will come to us less, because I see those seeking bitcoin on hard disks, will be lost and dead.

Well, from what i've heard, looking at the algorithm curve, it "looks" negligible in paper. The line becomes too steep, almost straight.

You mention $300,000 per coin. Well then yes, that would be awesome for us holders, and we wouldn't probably have a problem, but we need to get there. The thing is, nobody knows, what we know for a fact is what we have now: how the curve looks like. The price is an unknown variable. Satoshi predicted that BTC will either be a lot or nothing, so I guess if everything goes ok, we should be at 6 figures per BTC in the next decade, when the line becomes almost straight, otherwise we may face serious problems. Let's just hope it's a self fulfilling prophecy and we hit these dreamy 6 figure per coin prices. Back in 2012 $1000 felt dreamy, who is to say we can't hit $100,000+.

It's difficult to predict when the reward will be negligible.

In 10 years the subsidy will be 3.125 BTC per block.
At the current exchange rate, if the miner collects no transaction fees at all, that's nearly $8600 per block.  Is that "negligible"?

In 11 years the subsidy will drop to 1.5625 BTC per block.
At the current exchange rate, if the miner collects no transaction fees at all, that's nearly $4300 per block.  Is that "negligible"?

Of course, there is a real possibility that the exchange rate could go up over the next decade or so.

In 15 years the subsidy will drop below 1 BTC to 0.78125 BTC per block.
If the exchange rate is $300,000 per bitcoin, then even if the miner collects no transaction fees at all, that's still $234,375 per block.  Is that ""negligible"?

It's pretty much guaranteed that a change in the total supply would diverge into 2 different coins, but what worries me is if it's viable or not, to not have any inflation.

I need to see some reputable coders to speak on this. I have not seen any Core devs arguing about this so that is a good indicator there's nothing wrong with it (Unless you buy into the Core dev conspiracy theories).

I've heard some critique about it, claiming that if there is no inflation, when the reward is negligible (so that's in like 10 years) we will see problems, so we'll find out, we don't need to wait 140 years for the last BTC to be mined.

I totally agree here. My post was not about advocating for a 2MB hardfork in November. I also would like a longer evaluation period before any hardfork.

But there is - in the Bitcoin community - a difference between the 21 million rule and the blocksize. In the "blocksize war" there are notable different opinions, with a relatively large group of Bitcoiners agreeing to each position: The "extreme big blockers" that don't want any limit and would even be OK with gigabyte-large blocks, "moderate big blockers" (2-8MB) and "small blockers" (at most, 1 MB with segwit). In contrast, the 21 million supply cap is nearly unanimously agreed on - so it's much more difficult to change it with a hard fork. That's what the post was about.


A reason that could reach a bit of support would be the deflationary nature of Bitcoin, once we reach a supply between 20 and 21 million and the block rewards are worth less than the coins lost in addresses whose private keys aren't known anymore. There are disagreeing views about deflation, according to the economic schools, but there could be a group with some support on that reasoning. Only that I don't think it will ever reach consensus (what would be necessary to raise the cap in an undisputed hard fork).

One thing that is not emphasized strongly enough on this topic is that it is very difficult to envision a scenario in which there would be a positive reason to increase the coin supply beyond the current plan. Adding more coins dilutes the value of existing coins, so the current community of bitcoin users will naturally oppose such a change. Miners might like the idea of earning more coins with an enlarged block reward, but the course of events with the recent UASF and resulting SW2X outcome vs. Bitmain's efforts proves that miners who oppose the market will be forced to back down. At worst miners would create a "21M+" fork, and users would support the legacy fork, forcing hashrate to shift back to the economically valued chain and defeating the attempt to change the coin supply.

I would argue that Satoshi was offering a hypothetical example of why it might make sense for different use cases to each have their own blockchain (DNS, currency, etc) rather than try to have a single blockchain that can be used for every possible purpose. He wasn't saying that
Bitcoin users ACTUALLY might get "tyrannical" against raising the block size, but instead that BitDNS users shouldn't be dependent on what Bitcoin users want since they're each likely have different needs. Or did you think Satoshi was also predicting that BitDNS users were going to actually "be completely liberal about adding any large data features"

Satoshi was a visionary for his time but it isn't like he was infallible so take anything he says with a grain of salt and perhaps don't try to read too much into what he meant by it.

I think the Segwitx2 agreement is the best temporary solution to scaling and incorporates elements from both sides of the argument as to how to proceed forward.

Nice, but that statement was not a prediction. It was a hypothetical scenario used to show how one block chain is not necessarily suitable for all applications.

Of course we can't know exactly what satoshi had in mind, but that is irrelevant. What we know today is: We don't need to risk a hardfork in 3 months, there's enough space with 1MB (and now with segwit) to roll with it for at least a safe year while additional research is made on that possible hardfork to 2MB. Doing it in 3 months is just stupid. Why would you risk the current uptrend with another massive crash again due hardfork drama when we don't need to? Let's do things right for once.

It's not really a false statement when it is in fact true at the moment. Yes we there could be a proposed changed by the users but I think most people don't see a real purpose in doing so, because once again Bitcoin is divisible all the way down to .00000001. So increasing the maximum distribution of the coin really doesn't serve any purpose and in fact will devalue Bitcoin to current holders.