Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin DOES NOT have a Cap of 21 Million Coins!!
by
MicroGuy
on 10/10/2019, 12:56:41 UTC
The block rewards resets to 50 every 256 years making the supply grow indefinitely, forever.

lol. no it doesn't
is it April already?

This isn't a joke.

Satoshi made a mistake in the code that causes the block reward cycle to repeat itself every 256 years.

well first of all post the link to the lines of code that you think are doing this.

secondly even if there is such a thing in the code (which i seriously doubt it), it is a bug. and bugs don't define bitcoin. they will be fixed and removed. just like the inflation but that bitcoin experienced in early years. that didn't change anything about the supply even though the bug existed.

Fixing this bug correctly would require a hard fork which is not happening anytime soon!

Code:
int64_t nSubsidy = 50 * COIN;
    // Subsidy is cut in half every 210,000 blocks
    // which will occur approximately every 4 years.
    nSubsidy >>= (nHeight / 210000);

The block number is divided by 210000 (the "apparent" subsidy halving interval in blocks), and the result is used as input for a binary shift, applied to the original payout (50 BTC), expressed in base units.

Thanks to the new-goldmine interval being exactly 64 times the halving interval, and 64 being the size in bits of the currency datatype, the cycle repeats itself every 64 halvings.