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.
11Even of the spherical variety.