Topic: What if someday Bitcoin Foundation votes to remove 21M limitation? - page 3. (Read 6084 times)

If this ever happens, Satoshi will come back, form a new dev team that will fork based on the most recent code WITH the limitation, and ensure there are enough funds to keep them going for a limited time frame from his own stash. The BCF fork will die within a few months to a year.

Personally I am not buying this. I want the replay from somebody who is grown up.

Much confusion
Many disingenuous
Such fail

The Foundation is the first step towards BTC centralization. It's like: if you need international adoption and investors, you need centralization and controlled inflation. No more "to da moon" -kinda stuff

So most of the optimistic expectations are coming from the assumption that the existing fragile hashpower disposition will be forever: 20%-ish for BTCGuild, 35%-ish for CEX.io, 5%-ish for Slush pool, the rest 40% for "unknown sources", etc. However, in case of global BTC adoption it is easy for major players to possess up to 99% of the whole network and leave the remaining 1% for Slush+CexIO+BTCGuild+the rest. And not necessarily that possessing 99% of the whole network will cause massive double spending. They will just keep the network with all the nodes. Of course, the "original" or "true" BTC fork will be alive and running on the garage ASICs, and used for minor bar tiping or something like that.

This is similar to gold rush in California: amateurs with shovels are gone since shoveling is no longer profitable; big cartels with heavy machinery are now doing the mining, capturing new territories and setting new rules of the game.

What do they do apart from cause controversy exactly?

That's totally impossible!!
Bitcoin Foundation can't able to do that.
First, it's not a centralized foundation and second it's just impossible for anyone to remove the 21M limitation.

So much misunderstanding about what the foundation is and does.

I don't think the bitcoin foundation has this sort of control over the technology. They're just a seperate group really.

Miners this and miners that.... And who owns the majority of the hashing power? The evil corporations or the guy with 2  pathetic usb miners in his basement? If you want voting power, you buy it. If you want the control of bitcoin, you buy it.

The foundations votes don't count for anything. The miners are the ones that make the decisions. They vote with their hash power. The foundation is powerless to force anyone to do anything. They have to convince the majority stake miners to switch, and of course- why would they? It's not in their economic interest to do so. Thus- we will never remove the 21M limit. :-)

Bitcoin would fork. Those who had coins before the fork would find their coins existing on both chains. Both "Bitcoins" would be competing against each other and their communities would consider the other one to be an illegitimate imposter. This could become a permanent thing; i.e. an equilibrium could be reached and the two Bitcoins could co-exist side by side or an overwhelming majority of miners might switch to one fork and it would eventually be declared the winner and therefore the "true" Bitcoin.

Well that's good enough for me....if the limitation doesn't change that's 100% fine with myself and I'm sure 95%+ of investors

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.

they control nothing, other non evil miners would step in and start mining, and things would continue, the lack of the other miners would reduce difficulty.

what your missing and not understanding is that before asics we had this issue on a daily basis. miners had a small profit margin and as the profit went to 0 for some of them they simply stopped mining. the rest who still saw profit kept mining. even now there are differences in profit for different miners. even if some are forced out there will be others who arnt. as miners leave the profit for others will go up. it ALWAYS reaches a natural balance.



as a few others mentioned, nobody can force this change. it would just make a fork which everyone would ignore. if they dont adopt the change then the change doesnt matter.

No single entity would have enough mining power to force a change at this point in time. When a change is suggested by the developers, nodes and miners have a choice to either accept the change or not. Depending on what the majority do, that is what is considered to be the real fork and what the others do will be considered an alternate chain. This hasn't happened thus far - so far the developers haven't placed any crazy/radical new ideas into the code so miners and nodes haven't had to think too hard about what they should support. But you can bet your bottom dollar that even if a malicious entity popped up people would stop using that chain and instead follow the other one, effectively rendering the chain run by the nefarious entity useless.

No, the bitcoin foundation can't remove the limitations. They would need majority support from most of the nodes and miners. It will not happen.

The Bitcoin Foundation could hark-fork it, but it will be just an altcoin.

1. The Bitcoin Foundation has nothing to do with this. The name may be misleading, they merely try to represent the Bitcoin community in order to improve communication with governments, educating them about Bitcoin, and help generating broader acceptance of Bitcoin. But essentially it's just a random group of people. They have no more saying on the Bitcoin software, protocol, or ecosystem than you or me.

2. In case some developer (which developers would that be, exactly? the ones behind Armory? or Multibit? or Bitcoin-Qt? or Electrum? or blockchain.info? or all the Android an iOS apps? etc) decides they want to change the 21M limit, they can't just do it and expect the world to agree. It would simply cause a fork and the rest of the world would stick with the original Bitcoin protocol. They can propose a change, discuss with the rest of the Bitcoin world, and if (and ONLY if) the majority of all users worldwide decide it's a change for the better, such a development would be accepted.

then everyone will move to the next best altcoin