Why IS the bitcoin limited to 21 million? - page 2.

hugolp

legendary

Activity: 1148

Merit: 1001

Radix-The Decentralized Finance Protocol

Quote from: rebuilder on June 28, 2011, 06:57:12 AM

I seem to recall someone quoting Satoshi saying it was "an educated guess".
Whatever that means.

I think Satoshi has a very black sense of humour.

rebuilder

legendary

Activity: 1615

Merit: 1000

I seem to recall someone quoting Satoshi saying it was "an educated guess".
Whatever that means.

cbeast

donator

Activity: 1736

Merit: 1014

Let's talk governance, lipstick, and pigs.

Yeah, it's likely that it isn't an arbitrary number, but more related to the hashing algorithm chosen as the most efficient and secure.

Synaesthesia

sr. member

Activity: 546

Merit: 253

Well some arbitrary number had to be chosen. Might as well make it 21 million

Remember bitcoins can be divided up into really small fractions!

Fuzzy

hero member

Activity: 560

Merit: 500

Has anyone that is familiar with the source code behind bitcoin figured out why such an arbitrary number was chosen, and why it's so low to begin with?

21 million "scarce" bitcoins, to be the foundation of the new decentralized world currency?

Rumor has it that of the many iterations of bitcoin that the original dev had compiled, this just happened to be the one that snowballed, which explains why there is such a lack of built in security, and why the whole thing is so un-polished, it simply wasn't meant to be the final release/candidate.

Or maybe he got bored and just released whatever he had at the time and figured "let someone else figure it out".

Anyone have any reliable information not otherwise found on Wikipedia?

Topic: Why IS the bitcoin limited to 21 million? - page 2. (Read 11481 times)