Topic: What if someday Bitcoin Foundation votes to remove 21M limitation? - page 4. (Read 6094 times)

It is the miners who decide and if the economics of mining get too poor without block rewards that they are contemplating closing the shop they do have incentive to change things so that block rewards continue. It will mean a fork but do you really think that any meaningful percentage of miners will stay on the chain that is uneconomical to mine or do they also join the majority on the more popular chain that also keeps handing them bitcoins? The change to happen in the first place would of course need an agreed consensus of >51% of miners that they do want to change.

Also I think the opinion that the dent in reputation of bitcoin will cause everybody to move to an altcoin is the most silly opinion of them all. Which altcoin? You mean some of the thousand different altcoins? If there for some weird reason could be a selection of only one altcoin that everybody would switch to that also means practically the same thing as increasing the supply of bitcoins. What reason there would be to believe that if this ever happens that there would not be a second change from the first altcoin to some second altcoin. This in my opinion would dent the reputation of all cryptocurrencies irreparably. Changing bitcoin protocol would dent the reputation of bitcoin for sure, but the alternative approaches like changing to some altcoin are much are worse for the overall reputation and so the incentive of everybody in bitcoin economy would be to show happy face to the change and hope the dent do not last for long.

It is even possible that there is no dent at all and with some spin in marketing the general public does not even notice or agree that there was any change at all. The marketing message could be something like: "There was an emerging disaster looming in bitcoin as there would have been a hugely disruptive change deep down in insignificant details in bitcoin halving the block rewards but thanks to heroic effort of tireless developers and majority of bitcoin miners the looming threat was found early and thwarted and bitcoin will continue to work exactly as it has previously worked with no perilous and disastreous changes like block reward halving. Praise the lord, amen."

Actually I have the opinion that there is some nonzero probability of change of bitcoin protocol at some point in future.

We would simply keep using bitcoin instead of their incompatible altcoin

Hopefully people are bright enough to see this. If you inflate the currency you've ruined the last 4/5 years of bitcoins hard earned growth. Ruined one of it's first promises to miners and traders.

It won't happen

One of the major advantages with Bitcoin is protection against inflation. If we removes the limits, then the currency will no longer be guarded against inflation and will become similar to any other fiat currency.

Exactly right...
I can't see this happening and I think it definitely should not. Once there is enough in circulation thats it...it'll be nothing but success from there onward (my opinion).

Yes.

Not sure.

Anyway, bitcoin (and all alt-coins) is voluntary currencies.
You always have a right use original bitcoin core or switch to bitcoin-v2.0

then the price of bitcoin  reduce

I am not sure whether they can remove the 21 million limitation or not. But if they remove it, then it will badly affect the reputation of the currency. Once they increases the limit, then nothing guarantees you that they will not do it every now and then.

I agree here.. They will not want to diminish their own wealth. Personally they may not care about anyone else's holdings, but intentionally devaluing their own investment is not something I see them doing..

There's already satoshis and uBTC.

This will never happen.  The amount of btc will mimic about the amount of currency the world has now.  If anythijg they will extend the decimal places out further if a btc hits say 100 million

The conflict of interest thing is a concern for sure. With all the distrust of the bit coin foundation right now they would do well to address the issue openly.

It is possible but only with the consensus of the network this would then result in a Fork
However I do not believe it will work in practice although Bitcoin has been forked once before by accident
https://bitcoin.org/en/alert/2013-03-11-chain-fork

Simply put it would be very complex to do so without consensus since it requires all users to create a single block chain compatible with all bitcoin software.

I think it's a serious threat worth considering, and why we absolutely need to sever the ties between the Core devs and any single entity. If the majority of devs get behind this and are vocal, I think there's a legitimate chance we won't be able to beat it. If you put a Core alert (I think this still exists -- correct me if wrong, please) out telling people to update, I'd be willing to bet the majority of users would without doing in-depth research on it. Being paid by a central entity is an extraordinary conflict of interest. I would never suggest devs shouldn't be paid, but we have to figure out how to get them the funds to work on this full time without being some kind of employee.

Seriously, even having the devs agree on a % and using Coinsplit, where the donation address is put in the "About" page and on bitcoin.org would be a massive improvement and maybe even result in higher pay for those who enable a $multi-billion currency/commodity/whatever.

That is a really interesting page. I had only ever heard of the potential 51 % attack.

There's also the Sybil attack. I'll admit, I described it poorly in my fisr post here. Link to the wiki for reference.
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses#Sybil_attack

That is what I was thinking but i wasn't certain. If any of us are around in 140 years we might see a real fight between users and miners over fees.

The government (or the Bitcoin Foundation) can't really attack Bitcoin from a technological standpoint. All they CAN do is influence/control the market.