In 2010 Bitcoin had a critical bug (integer overflow) which resulted in hundreds of millions of BTC being created. At the time the network was small enough that users accepted the patch for it which forked the chain.
In 2018 another inflation bug was found by a Bitcoin Cash developer who was kind enough to fix it instead of take advantage of it himself.
Bitcoin is just software. Lots of people involved in Bitcoin don't know anything about software and treat it like a religion. Bitcoin can barely do a few transactions per second even when it's main use case is leverage trading on exchanges. I'm sorry but that'll never be how you take over the world's payments.
Instead of innovating on the software, the Bitcoin cult just declares it "done". I like Bitcoin but the community has actively sabotaged the project. It looks like the one world currency will be Libra (or similar) instead. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.
Me neither.
Gold may have a finite supply, but it's been mined for millennia and has slowly increased its supply rate over time, and will likely continue to do so in our lifetime.
In contrast, Bitcoin's emission which ranges from 2009 through 2140 is heavily tilted to the first few years.
Its final century from 2040 through 2140 accounts for only about 0.5% of emission.
The only point of the halvings is to be able to claim "finite supply". A constant reward would still have the yearly supply inflation rate (stock to flow ratio) going to 0, albeit more slowly. So crucially, supply would still be scarce, would be more predictable (time independent), more fair to late adopters, and be much closer to Gold's emission over our lifetime.
It would also avoid the inherent instability [1] of mining rewards dominated by transaction fees, and avoid lengthening confirmation times to maintain security against double spending [2].
If we further consider the fact that coins inevitably get lost, then even a constant reward will yield a softcap of supply, where yearly emission merely serves to balance the yearly losses.
[1] https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~arvindn/publications/mining_CC...
[2] https://www.coindesk.com/the-halving-exposes-bitcoin-to-51-a...
Bitcoin just "is", how you decide to use it is up to you.. that's the whole point. IMO for it to be money it would need to be adopted for 3 use cases SoV->MoE->UoA, in that order.
> Bitcoin value is based on speculation
Yeah, seems like a lot of people are betting that it will be the global money in the future, so they are building positions now. That's why you get this nice market signal - bitcoin's price increasing relative to other monies, before it has actually become money.
> First of all, fixed scarcity? Is this actually a good thing? And is Bitcoin actually scarce? How does hard forking affect the scarcity? And is there a reason why any singular fork of Bitcoin is the one and true cryptocurrency?
Yes. Yes. Yes. How does the scarcity of Swiss Francs affect the scarcity of Japanese Yen? Not directly, but I'm sure there is some effect. People disagree about this, but IMO Bitcoin is the fork that the majority of economic actors on the network use.
> "Software durability" also is pretty funny
They're referring to the Bitcoin consensus code I think.
> How much cryptocurrency has been stolen through software exploits
Compared to the amount of gold and fiat that's been stolen, I would say not much.
> However, if you're thinking about a value storage, is portability actually that good?
It is. Certainly if you need to escape some increasingly repressive regime. If I was an activist trying to get out of Hong Kong right now, I certainly wouldn't be carrying bricks of gold with me.
Bitcoin can be forked and has been many times but the fork with the most proof-of-work is generally considered the 'one true Bitcoin'. This proof-of-work (aka longest chain) metric provides a way to measure the relative scarcity of various cryptocurrencies.
The problem with Bitcoin as a value store is the value it has. I'd argue that the current Bitcoin value is based on speculation and not on anything concrete. Oil and gold obviously have very concrete practical uses, since we can use them to make our cars move, our houses warm and our computers do something.
US Dollar obviously is less concrete since its value is based on people agreeing that it has a value - but it has a very large backing. Obviously there's a country where 300+ million people have agreed that the US Dollar has value and you can find someone to trade in your dollars all around the world.
Also, I'm not completely impressed with the comparison between gold and Bitcoin. First of all, fixed scarcity? Is this actually a good thing? And is Bitcoin actually scarce? How does hard forking affect the scarcity? And is there a reason why any singular fork of Bitcoin is the one and true cryptocurrency? Because if there's something with no scarcity, it's cryptocurrency in general.
"Software durability" also is pretty funny. I don't consider software all that durable. How much cryptocurrency has been stolen through software exploits, be it within a cryptocurrency itself or via some adjecent software, thus far?
Portability and storage for Bitcoin also sound pretty good at first. However, if you're thinking about a value storage, is portability actually that good? If I want to store $500k as an asset, I don't actually want it to be that portable since I don't want anyone else be taking it. $500k in gold is like 8 kg, so at least it's not something that someone can sneak out or take from across the world. And a safe or vault have costs associated with it, that's what I want for value storage.