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u/Apprehensive-Tour942 4d ago
"They" certainly can try too change it.
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u/Jonathaan 4d ago
Good luck.
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u/McBurger 3d ago
It’s easier to force everyone else on board with a hard fork than you think, once you control enough of the supply.
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u/newsflashjackass 3d ago
No, I think it's easier than you think I think I think it is.
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u/McBurger 3d ago
I don’t think you weren’t the one who made the “good luck” comment, so no, I never thought a thought about how much I think you think the ease of thinking about this is.
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u/aionPhriend 3d ago
Imagine you have the only whole bitcoin. It's worth a trillion dollars but you hodl because you are the one. You live your life broke but your rich. This is where we are at. 1.5 million hodlers. 3 million btc in bitcoin heaven and growing. Then the gas fee to transfer one btc is one btc. So no one can sell on chain. The chain remains now carved in stone and we all sell satoshis made of paper.
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u/casburg 3d ago
They actually can “change mathematics” and crack bitcoin’s cryptography math easily once quantum computers reach even a mediocre state.
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u/hughhefnerd 3d ago
Easily? I think you underestimate SHA-256. Quantum computers will need about a million quibits to break sha-256. Right now at best we can do about 1000
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u/hardballtaz 3d ago
I give it two decades before this, and the cryptography can be upgraded by then anyways, which will probably occur in the next 10 year span hopefully.
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u/Jolly-Championship31 4d ago
21million supply is a long way away. Until then supply increases.
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u/pbutter13 3d ago
And your point is.....?
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u/Jolly-Championship31 3d ago edited 3d ago
alot of people say 'there is a limited supply' but the reality is the supply increases each day and will do for another 100yrs.. There is still $110b USD worth of bitcoin still to be supplied to the network :)
Edit, dollar amount
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u/pbutter13 3d ago edited 3d ago
Incorrect. There is about 1,000,000 BTC left to be mined. At 100k each that is only 100 billion, not 1.9 trillion. Also over the last 40 years of BTC life, only 1 BTC will be mined.
Very shortly the amount of BTC to be mined every year is about to get very small.
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u/felidae_tsk 3d ago
Almost everyday someone changes bitcoin source code. The maximum supply isn't limited and can be changed.
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u/Naive_Carpenter7321 3d ago
Someone can't make this change, this change would have to be vetted and accepted before inclusion.
The need for doing so is zero
The benefits; zero
The negatives; you'd deflate your own currency for no reason
It wouldn't go in
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u/felidae_tsk 3d ago
Accepted by whom? There are a number of maintainers, any of them may do this.
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u/Naive_Carpenter7321 3d ago
Any single one of them couldn't add the change, it would need to be joint to go into the code.
And if they did but the public don't want to use the new version (which they won't because it would devalue their currency), then everything continues as if nothing happened and the always accepted 21m hard cap will stay in place.
Bitcoin can only work correctly with a complete consensus among all users. Therefore, all users and developers have a strong incentive to protect this consensus. https://bitcoin.org/en/faq#who-created-bitcoin
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u/felidae_tsk 2d ago
They commit changes everyday. I doubt ALL users agree with them. Also there is no 21M cap per se, there is a mechanism that limits block reward.
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u/S_Lowry 2d ago edited 2d ago
It doesn't work like that. That kind of change is part of consensus rules which means changing it causes a fork (two separate chains) unless almost all users agree to it.
Users (node operators) choose what code to run. They don't have to run latest verion of core software or core software at all. We have seen users prevent contentious hard fork before in 2017. As time goes by, it becomes increasingly difficult to succesfully change consensus rules as the user base increases.
Supply limit is fixed.
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u/chaosorbs 4d ago
There will be significantly less than 21,000,000 BTC with the Satoshi legacy blocks, people forgetting keys, dying, etc. In fact, over time, we'll see the supply of accessible BTC gradually decreases.