Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: [Curiosity made ask] Why the limitation in bitcoin just 21 million?
by
mamesso
on 24/09/2024, 16:20:43 UTC
While one OP created a thread about how Bitcoin will take over the global payment word in the future, and I tried to understand that Bitcoin itself is limited to 21 million only and its increase is not even certain, which eventually might end up with a yes/no answer. And it's going to take more than some decades to change from that.
Bitcoin is designed on the principle of limited supply, this is one of the advantages that makes Bitcoin rare, and guarantees its value will increase in the future. Perhaps Satoshi had a grand plan that is hard to explain why the maximum limit of Bitcoin available is only 21 million pieces, even though he could create as many as he wanted. Limiting the maximum supply will make each smallest fraction of a Bitcoin (satoshi) increase in value over time. For example, if the price of Bitcoin reaches $1 million (1 BTC = 100 million satoshis), then each satoshi will be worth $0.01.

So curiosity made me ask why it is limited and why more can't be made before those decades. I'm just a beginner with little to no knowledge about bitcoin technically. 
Here is an email conversation between Satoshi and Mike Hearn (Bitcoin Core contributor) on April 12, 2009, perhaps this will represent the answer to your question.
Quote
If you imagine it being used for some fraction of world commerce, then there's only going to be 21 million coins for the whole world, so it would be worth much more per unit.  Values are 64-bit integers with 8 decimal places, so 1 coin is represented internally as 100000000.  There's plenty of granularity if typical prices become small.  For example, if 0.001 is worth 1 Euro, then it might be easier to change where the decimal point is displayed, so if you had 1 Bitcoin it's now displayed as 1000, and 0.001 is displayed as 1.
Source: https://www.bitcoin.com/satoshi-archive/emails/mike-hearn/1/