Re: Why 21 million bitcoins? Why was ~that~ number chosen?
⭐ Merited by vapourminer (2)
Ok,
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm new to bitcoin (love it!) and doing a lot of research.
How did Satoshi Nakamoto come up with 21 million, for his (their?) limit to bitcoin?
Because we use base 10, it seems to me that 50 million, 100, million, or 25 million would be a 'better' number to have ended up with.
Or, if you wanted to derive a mathematical number, why not double a number, to get to 16.7 million (16,777,216) or 33.5 million (33,554,432) bitcoin?
21 million bitcoin just seems like a random number.
Or is it?
Forgive my ignorance, but I'm new to bitcoin (love it!) and doing a lot of research.
How did Satoshi Nakamoto come up with 21 million, for his (their?) limit to bitcoin?
Because we use base 10, it seems to me that 50 million, 100, million, or 25 million would be a 'better' number to have ended up with.
Or, if you wanted to derive a mathematical number, why not double a number, to get to 16.7 million (16,777,216) or 33.5 million (33,554,432) bitcoin?
21 million bitcoin just seems like a random number.
Or is it?
The bitcoin.SE is a good reference on this:
http://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/8439/why-was-21-million-picked-as-the-number-of-bitcoins-to-be-created
It's a good thing Satoshi didn't go much higher, because 21 * 10^14 is breaching on what a signed 64 bit integer can hold.