Re: By what mechanism the total quantity of bitcoin is limited to 21 millions?
Could someone explain me how the total quantity of bitcoin is limited to 21 millions?
Please, don't tell me it is written in the program
It is. The way mining works is that the miners will mine blocks with the correct block reward and that is the way that Bitcoins are distributed. The block reward is coded into the clients and they will only accept blocks with the correct block reward and that is how they have a limited supply.Please, don't tell me it is written in the program
However, its not perfect and it is impossible for it to be exactly 21 million Bitcoins. Even if it can be, the earlier miners had poorly written client that resulted in incorrect block rewards being claimed and thus the exact value is far from 21million Bitcoins.
So is it more then 21 million or less?
Am I correct in thinking that one could hard fork and make total supply any arbitrary number?
You could also hard fork and have all the 21 million for yourself and nobody else, but it is not really Bitcoin then, is it?
Bitcoin is the largest (based on the difficulty of computation) blockchain with certain rules, that define blockchain itself. One of these rules as a consequence have that there will only be 21 million BTC. A hard fork can be anything, you can make as a rule that every block needs to contain a picture of a cat, but that is a whole different program. There are only limitations on a soft fork (old clients need to accept the fork), not a hard fork.