Quote from: gmaxwell on January 21, 2016, 03:54:08 AM

Quote from: Lauda on January 20, 2016, 09:10:32 PM

Pieter Wuille proposed that we increase the supply to 42million (after the first 21 million have been mined)

...Pieter proposed no such thing. Bitcoin's creator did: The original 21 million limit didn't work right and after a few hundred years would have repeated the coin distribution all over again, and we fixed it.

Recognize that this change injected subjectivty into the system. Greg called it a bug fix, implying that he knew that Bitcoin's nature was something other than what was defined by the code. And I would agree.

This is an excellent jumping off point for the broader discussion of "what is Bitcoin?" Was Bitcoin's nature written in stone when Satoshi created the reference client? Or is its nature free to evolve through a market-based process, or something else?

Most of us would agree--based on our intuitive understanding of what Bitcoin ought to be--that the reward distribution probably shouldn't reset back to 50 BTC/block in 2140. For this reason, the rules as defined by the code were changed to prevent another 21 million coins from being mined after 2140.

Bitcoin is a product of the market--defined by the code we freely choose to run. There are no sacred cows.¹

¹Even of the spherical variety.