Quote from: Impaler on November 24, 2013, 04:58:06 AM

Quote from: markjamrobin on November 24, 2013, 03:49:34 AM

Quote from: 501 on November 24, 2013, 03:44:56 AM

Quote from: solex on November 24, 2013, 01:48:13 AM

First, scarcity. While the number of bitcoins is supposed to stop at 21 million, whose to say that will happen? The whole point is that it is user generated and not policed by a middle man.

I hope she is trolling.

I'm an investor. I know absolutely nothing about programming. But it took me about 1 second of research into bitcoin to understand that the number of coins would stop at 21M. Surely if you just google "bitcoin" there will be a couple links on the first page that cover this.

Either she is trolling, or she thinks bitcoins are actually magic beans that can deny the laws of math.

Technically a network consensus to a hard fork could keep the currency flow going, correct?

Exactly, people often falsely claim or believe that 'cryptography' some how creates the 21 million cap (people who 'know nothing about programming' seem to be very likely to hold this belief as our friend above dose), nothing could be further from the truth.

It is only the honesty of the mining network (and by that we mean literally just the handful of major pool operators) that enforces the cap. Obviously the high visibility of breaking the cap and the fact that many miners hold many coins that would crash (And I mean a Hyper crash the likes of which would make all prior crashes look like hiccups) provides a huge disincentive, but it's nothing more then an incentive structure, one that gets weaker all the time as mining becomes more of a cartel and margins become thinner.

It is true that cryptography has nothing to do with the 21 million cap, however its enforcement is (fortunately) not solely based on the honesty of the mining network : you can have as much mining pools as you want who would change the rules (remove the 21 million cap) and mine blocks according to these new rules, all the other nodes of the network would reject theses blocks. And these pools could represent 99% of the hashing power, their blocks would be rejected nonetheless.

It is also important to point out that pool operators control as much hashing power as their users are willing to give them : if individual miners realize that their pool operator does things they disagree with, they can leave the pool, leaving the operator powerless.