Topic: What if someday Bitcoin Foundation votes to remove 21M limitation? - page 5. (Read 6094 times)

Tell them to support Peercoin, then.

yes it's 51% of the block founds so usually from more then 51% of the hash power as you require to find block faster then the rest to make your fork longer.

After the last block reward, the network is supposed to live on tx fee as reward for mining (so mining never end)

That is the way I understand it. Not sure what happens after the last reward block is mined.

Isn't it 51% of the hashing power can create a "real" fork in the blockchain, not a simple 51% of the nodes?
Otherwise people would create cheap "spam nodes" and take over the network.

when economics of mining becomes not profitable for many hardware (around some halfing 12.5 not likely but 6.25 is possible, but 3.125 and after are sure dangerous points). some will be tempted at that point to use not enough energy efficient mining equipment that would be stop to do 51%. This equipment can be bought at big rebate or even for free to switch on to attack.


transaction fee will never be enough to compensate with the current size (higher fee will just make it more expensive then cash to transfer so useless no one will pay 0.01 BTC to buy it's grocery at 0.1 BTC ) the only option is bitcoin becoming very very expensive so reward is enough to not turn most mining equipment off and pay for maintenance and electrical cost. this would in fact only delay it until a next halfing makes it unprofitable. the only way out is to get xTH/s asics at >0.05w for 5$ so everyone would have one in his pc or cell phone and tx fee becomes enough to keep them running(tx fee not likely to be enough if BTC is to be used in day to day by user). But this has a big chance to have something wrong that prevent this from happening


the first step will be when buying/producing new mining equipement is for 90% guanrantiy to be unprofitable. the next is when the problem will come the equipment becomes obsolete so mining becomes unprofitable(this can also happen with BTC to 30$, that would be another problem and increase coin supply would not be helpful in that case).


the mining business at some point will ask for block reward that cover cost and this will be the turning point to increase supply. and since they are the concensus they will have the power to dictate it. (most miner don't keep most BTC mine, but sell to pay cost so 20% drop in price for xM coins/Year supply will be acceptable for them)


P.S. I don't like it. I don't want it to happen but the tx fee will never be enough to keep the mining running. so other solution can complement it and not touch supply, but the actual reality point to that

riot

A lot of great responses and points of view.  Thank you to all who are contributing.

if this happened, i'd invest in other alt currencies because it would totally crash the price of BTC, and people would look elsewhere. since i'd guess that people who are involved with bitcoin own them, i don't think they'd do this.. unless they dumped their coins beforehand.

Most Bitcoin users want it to be a store of value, a medium of exchange, and a frictionless transaction system. Inflation runs counter to the store of value function. Inflation/deflation has no bearing on frictionless transactions.

Ok well, thanks for the correction.

Nobody in their right mind is going to switch.

There's two types of Bitcoin users.

Those who want to get rich from it (anti inflation).
And those who want it to be a frictionless way to transact (neutral/pro inflation).

This - thanks for posting this.  There will be Bitcoin and this inflate-a-coin fork.  Then people will have coins on both forks and pick the one that makes the most sense.

There would be 2 forks, and most likely, the majority would stay on the orriginal chain

And what do you describe as the 'big dogs'? The ones that'll donate 100,000BTC just to join a foundation? The ones that want to lose wealth?

You have things completely mixed up. Bitcoin Foundation =/= Control over the implementation

The reality is that miners and nodes will accept and implement changes that they agree with, so even if the developers decided to do this (which they wouldn't) unless most of the nodes and miners accepted this you'd never actually get a change. Not to mention that the Bitcoin Foundation has little to do with actually how the protocol is implemented - they more of a fake 'voice' for Bitcoin that is basically charging exorbitant fees that supports leechers and in return you get nothing.

This.  Then the foundation would mine their weakcoin and you would have 2 forks to eat with

There is an opinion that the Foundation is full of crap and controls nothing. I am just speculating that there is a possibility that the Foundation is not that harmless and powerless than it could appear at the first look. I almost guarantee the changes once the real big dogs start joining the Foundation.

That's irrelevant to the topic. We were talking about the Bitcoin Foundation, and you switch to a conspiracy theory.

How about that?

This is not quite correct.  Even if 51% of users actually want to change, they still can't force a change upon the other 49%.  

A highly controversial change to bitcoin would likely result in a blockchain fork such that after the fork two coins would exist: bitcoin and bitcoin++.  Pre-fork coins would be valid on both chains.

Bitcoin++ would trade directly against bitcoin and the market's opinion of bitcoin++ would quickly become clear. For it to become the dominant fork, the economic majority would need to be willing to swap their bitcoins for additional bitcoin++ coins, thereby legitimizing the new chain.  However, it isn't logical for the holders of a currency to voluntarily agree to an increase in the inflation rate unless it was somehow to their benefit.  

Are there any circumstances where it would be generally agreed that an increase in the inflation rate is necessary?  The only thing I can think of is to increase network security should the fees from transactions not be deemed adequate some point in the distant future.  Perhaps the economic majority would feel that a perpetual 0.5% inflation rate is superior to 0%, as it represents a direct subsidy to miners who secure the network.  Note that this doesn't actually benefit miners, as there is no reason to expect profit margins in the mining sector to increase.  It just means that more energy would be directed towards securing the network.

In summary, it would take much more than 51% agreement to change bitcoin's inflation schedule.  The economic majority of bitcoin holders would have to be willing to trade out of bitcoin and into bitcoin++, accepting the risk that this new inflating version could collapse sucking all their wealth with it.  In other words, it would have to be pretty obvious that an increase in the inflation rate was necessary.