Topic: What if someday Bitcoin Foundation votes to remove 21M limitation? - page 2. (Read 6094 times)

Keeping always  N number of coins (like 21M) in circulation is possible: coins will always been lost due to lost passwords, hodler dies, etc, etc

Then the world would laugh and quietly ignore such nonsense.

But worry not, such craziness won't occur. It's not under anyone's control except consensus of the community.

Even if the core devs vote to remove the 21M limit, it still won't make it so.

They will be rich and famous either way when mass adoption comes. The only realistic possibility of this kind of change might be a POS protocol to keep it around 21 million in circulation but this would be 50-60 years away at least.

Ok, lets forget about "voting" and "bitcoin foundation" for the moment.

How about hedge funds contact core devs and tell them: "guys, in order to make this thing would-wide spread we need a controlled inflation: we need to remove "halving". Lets say for solving a block it will always be N number of coins. You guys will be rich, famous and your names will be written in history forever. From our side we guarantee at least 51% of mining power with the updated bitcoin protocol where there is no 21M limitation anymore. The garage miners could stick to the old protocol or whatever - their old bitcoins are useless".

I think this is very possible if we are talking about wide adoption of bitcoin.

I may be mistaken, but would it require the consensus of everyone who uses Bitcoin (as opposed to only those who mine) to enact such a change?  I am still fairly new to how the Bitcoin protocol is designed.

Celroc

The core developers do not have the final say the miners do. If the miners do not accept the new protocol then it will not happen.

Say, at some point big banks and hedge funds make an agreement with core developers to remove the limitation of 21M and have the foundation vote for this?
Is it possible in theory and on practice?

The community would never allow it. Part of the sheer brilliance of the protocol is that it requires consensus.

Excellent question

Maybe this is one of the ideas that government think tanks come up with, outlaw "evil deflationary" cryptos?

Removing the limitation broke DOGE's back! It would probably lead to a run on the next best alternative SHA256 currency, whatever that is.

How many miners would have to agree?
The main pool owners? Miners themselves?

The Bitcoin Foundation cannot simply change Bitcoin.

They are able to propose a change to the code of Bitcoin, however the miners must approve the changes in order for it to be adopted.

In the past the changes have been deemed "a good idea" and "good for bitcoin" so they have been approved by the miners (via a hardfork in the blockchain)

The situation was very different when mining was done with one guy with one GPU that he switched to mining whenever he was not playing games on the computer. They could switch on and off at whim.

Things are developing fast into the direction that only profitable mining is going to be done in some few places on planet where electricity is cheap and they have the most bleeding edge HW running on huge datacentres. Whenever that becomes unprofitable there is nobody to step up in near term to fill the gap so that bitcoin economy as a whole that needs the mining can continue uninterrupted. There is going to be huge drop in profitability at the moment when block rewards cease to exist. At that moment all the mining gear at individual homes not in the datacentres has been obsoleted long ago and have been collecting dust at some attic for along time.

If somebody closes datacentres they need to be cleared from the equipment so that the facilities can be rented for some other use and without revenue from block rewards there is not enough money to go around for anybody rebuild the datacentres back up. They do not sit idle waiting if mining will become profitable in the future. They need to run constantly to pay the rent or be dismantled.

Or probably it actually works so that some will quit and some will stay and in this case mining will be concentrated to much fewer hands and getting the 51% will be very easy buying unprofitable mining datacentres from bankruptcies and the one reason to buy them is getting 51% to some one persons hands.

I believe keeping the mining profitable without any significant drop is actually very much in the interest of bitcoin economy as a whole to prevent any huge datacentres ever becoming available to the market for a ridiculously low price as that would be a disaster much bigger than anything else.