Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin does not have limited supply
by
Pan Troglodytes
on 04/10/2018, 12:58:04 UTC
The argument is again and again that the value of Bitcoin will increase because supply is limited to 21 million. But this is quite simply wrong. Every time Bitcoin is forked that is in real terms an expansion of the Bitcoin currency beyond 21 million. To some degree the same is true of alternative crypto currencies which will flood the market. There is already more than 1000 cryptocurrencues ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies )
I agree (partially) with that statement. The other crypto adds its supply to the supply of bitcoin. But the catch is in the weighted way that the new supply should be added. To be more precise: if a new crypto has some little fraction of bitcoin's total market cap, then the total supply of bitcoin can be increased with the same fraction of the new crypto's supply. Those weights make those 1000 other cryptocurrencies completely insignificant, with maybe a few exceptions. Those exceptions do add some more-or-less significant fraction to bitcoin's 21 million, but all in all I guess it is just another few millions. Probably much less then the total lost bitcoin count, anyway