Post
Topic
Board Economics
Re: Why bitcoin supply will NOT cap at 21M BTC
by
brenzi
on 18/06/2014, 07:18:26 UTC
Government loyalists can threaten all they like, I have made copies of some of the early versions of the source code just in case they try anything as I'm sure other people have, they will not win.
And what do you intend to do with your backups in case of manipulated bitcoin releases? Start your own blockchain? With a market cap of 0$? For the kids to play with?
You have got that backwards.  Even if a majority of full nodes and miners opt to go with the protocol changes you suggest that is the new branch after the hard fork.  The blocks that continue to build on the original blockchain using the orginal protocol supported by clients that use the original protocol supported by miners that still use the original protocol is the original chain.  That is still Bitcoin, even if you attempt to name the new alt coin created by the hard fork "Bitcoin" it is still just another alt coin.
OK, got your point. But I think, you're missing one important point:

Let's say you've got N BTC now. You would be cheering because after such a hard fork you will have N oldBTC plus N newBTC. You're wrong if you think that this makes you more wealthy. If the majority uses newBTC, then this will mean that the real value of your oldBTC will pop to close to nothing, because no one will want to buy those coins because no goods can be legally bought with them anymore. Of course, some illegal trade could continue using oldBTC. But this will be a small fraction of the original market (For those, something like zerocoin would be more attractive anyway).

Probably the real value of newBTC will also drop because all the hoarders see no point in hoarding anymore as an inflationary policy will be applied to newBTC.

As I suggested it should be called "UnCoin" since the supply would be manipulated and controled by the UN in your ideal scenario.
I just want to make clear that this is not "my ideal scenario". I'm not judging anything of this with my liking or disliking. All I say is what I think could happen.