If you want to know how difficult it is, try imagening this:
There are 1 million people and your task is convincing over 0.5 million of them to take 90% of their dollars and throw them into a big fire.
That's how difficult it is to make this change.
(the dollars in this scenario must still be considered as valuable ;p)
Topic: How hard is the 21 million cap on bitcoin? - page 2. (Read 4822 times)
I could of course look in the code,
The miner's code could be modified to change the rules and grant any number of coins but that block then would be relayed to peers. Since that change breaks the protocol, peer nodes would reject that block as being invalid and then would not relay it.
Now if other nodes run the same change and thus accept that block, they will relay it but it still doesn't matter if nobody will buy those mined coins.
So there would be a reason for enough people (an "economic majority") to decide that the change is wanted and to be willing to buy those coins from the miner.
But if you hold bitcoins, you wouldn't want those to be devalued and thus would reject the change.
And if you have borrowed coins and have to repay, and the lender will refuse any coins issued after the change occurred, then you won't buy those coins from the miners either.
So yes ... technically it is as easy as changing one line of code. But getting the economic majority to accept the change is the hard part (essentially the impossible part, for the change you are suggesting).
- http://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Economic_majority
There are already coins where the limit Is the sky like feathercoin, chinacoin and shitcoin...
Nothing is stopping you if you wanted to do that but most of us would ignore your alteration so your NewBitCoin probably wouldn't be very valuable.
Anyone that modified the code to create additional coins would be creating a fork--a seperate ledger.
I am wondering how hard is the 21M cap on bitcoin.
Is it juts a define that easily could be changed?
#define MAX_BITCOIN 21000000;
in to
#define MAX_BITCOIN 1000000000;
recompile and now we have a 1 billion cap.
I could of course look in the code, but I think there are people here who already know and it save me time.
Is it juts a define that easily could be changed?
#define MAX_BITCOIN 21000000;
in to
#define MAX_BITCOIN 1000000000;
recompile and now we have a 1 billion cap.
I could of course look in the code, but I think there are people here who already know and it save me time.
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