Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

Comment by arcticbull | Hacker News Reader

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The supply is controlled solely by a group of random, un-elected, un-accountable to anyone, GitHub contributors. If the Bitcoin Dev Team wanted, they could up the number of coins. Arbitrarily. Without recourse. What are you going to do, fork it?

Further, the massive, overwhelming breakage due to the user-hostile nature of cryptocurrencies has led to staggering deflation. 20% is gone already [1].

Finally, the worst part is that the Bitcoin wealth distribution is worse than any banana republic; 0.00088% of addresses control 17.5% of all coins. 4.11% of addresses control 96.53% of coins. [2] Unless you're a whale, you're fighting for scraps today, and the next generation of market participants will be basically serfs. Deflation and breakage exaggerate this problem.

If you thought letting them eat cake was bad...

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/news/20-all-btc-lost-unrecovera...

[2] https://howmuch.net/articles/bitcoin-wealth-distribution

The Bitcoin Dev Team could certainly write code that gave them 100 million coins, but it will be difficult to convince the miners, exchanges, payment processors, wallet developers and the rest of the community to run it.

And this is exactly what happened early in Monero's history, where the lead developer got ejected from the community: https://monero.stackexchange.com/questions/1011/monero-incep...

And this is also what's happening now in Bitcoin Cash, where the developers of ABC (up until now the client almost everyone used) wants to assign themselves 8% of the rewards from a mined block. And the the rest of the community are rejecting it heavily.

So yes, the community would fork it.

It's not impossible to change Bitcoin's supply, but there's zero chance the Bitcoin developers would get away with it. They can make whatever changes to the protocol they wish, but they can't force anyone to adopt those changes.

And yes, a lot of Bitcoin has been carelessly lost, but these are mostly old cases before Bitcoin had any exchange value. You've probably read about people throwing away hard drives with 1000s of mined bitcoins that ended up being worth millions a few years later. Hindsight is 20-20.

It should also be pointed out that a sizable chunk of Bitcoin is essentially frozen in Satoshi's wallets. Whether to count them into the supply is debatable. Same for Hal Finney.

> What are you going to do, fork it?

Yes. Miners with huge operations whose profitability depends on people's trust in bitcoin are going to refuse to deploy the new software.

If the "Dev Team" upped the number of coins it would be a fork, none of the existing nodes would accept it.

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