Comment by kibwen
14 hours ago
> But Bitcoin is hard capped at 21 million coins
Bitcoin is not an immutable law of nature. If the coin minting cap is reached, all that needs to happen is for miners to start running a fork with a higher cap. Tada, more coins conjured out of the ether, just like all the previous ones. If you want enforced scarcity, you need to be tied to something physically scarce.
The miners can totally start mining a fork, in fact they can start doing so today, but it doesn't matter because nobody will use their fork and then they will have lost out on their hundreds of millions of dollars of investments into mining equipment.
The node operators play just as critical of a role in Bitcoin as the miners.
It's not the node operators either, it's the people who transact on the chain that determine the value of the coins. The miners can disrupt the ability of the chain to transact to some degree, but they can't make people think their fork is worthwhile (why anyone still thinks BTC has much long-term value is beyond me, but...).
Yes! Thank for that correction.
> in fact they can start doing so today
In fact they already have. There are 10s of thousands of forks of Bitcoin. Only a handful ever got significant attention. And, the original is still much larger than all of the forks combined.
Right, but a counter point is the etherium fork. Only a handful of people stayed on the “classic” chain after that first DAO turned out to have a massive extraction bug in it.
"I tell ya, everything will be perfect again if everyone would just migrate to BCv6."
It would require the market to move as well to consider those new coins worth anything, though. Miners do not have enough control of the chain to make such changes on their own.
all that needs to happen is for countries to destroy their nuclear weapons
all that needs to happen is for governments to stop burning fossil fuels
all that needs to happen is for researchers to publish boring papers replicating others results
all that needs to happen is for fishermen to stop overfishing
Coordination problems seem easy but never really are. The chance of all the miners just suddenly agreeing to do something all at once is pretty low to impossible.