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Re:Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investo... by mensetmanusman on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @07:52AM (#29011969)
The funny thing is that death or mental illness by a hoarder means the btc go poof until the end of time.

Therefore, over a long enough time scale, the number of available BTC tends towards zero.

Re:Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investo... by ur-whale on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @08:17AM (#29012213)
That's assuming that BTC's aren't infinitely divisible.

Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained.

Therefore, it's unlikely that there will ever be zero bitcoins.

Re:Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investo... by noch on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @09:27AM (#29013020)
> Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained.

Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. But, no worries because we have millisatoshis in Lightning. Because Bitcoin scales in layers, each layer can implement more and more divisibility as required.

https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704

As you said, bitcoin is infinitely divisible, therefore the world economy can run on 1 btc or 1 satoshi.

Re:Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investo... by ur-whale on Thursday October 28, 2021 @02:28PM (#29029517)
> Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin.

True, it'd be a hard fork. However, I don't believe hard forks are impossible if managed properly.

The taproot upgrade (not a hard fork, I know) was rather uncontroversial and accepted rather easily.

I suspect a hard fork allowing for - say - bitcoin amounts encoded in 64 bits would not necessarily generate the kind of upheaval the blocksize wars did.

And, hopefully, even for controversial upgrades, the lessons of said wars will have been learnt and the process of upgrading Bitcoin can be done in a slightly more reasonable / orderly fashion.

Re:Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investo... by spiralx on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @10:25PM (#29021620)
Whether you cut a pie into 10 million slices or 10 billion slices you still only have one pie in total in the same way that changing ten dimes for a hundred cents still means you have a dollar.

In a world where only 1,000,000 BTC remain in circulation if one person owns 500,000 of them means he controls half of the total value of BTC and that everyone else's coins will add up to the other 500,000 BTC, and being able to divide the each BTC into smaller and smaller amounts doesn't change that fact. Whether we can divide 500,000 BTC into 50 trillion Satoshis or 5 quadrillion "New Satoshis" worth 1e-10 BTC each doesn't make new wealth appear.

Re:Bitcoin is largely controlled by a small group of investo... by xtracto on Wednesday October 27, 2021 @12:23PM (#29015425)
This is something not so many people take into account regarding cryptocurrencies. The real "total number" of any cryptocurrency is the total number of decimals they contain. There are currently a total of 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis. A satoshi is $0.00059 USD. A Satoshi could cost $0.01 (1 cent) and it could still be paired with the US economy. If 99% of Satoshis became unavailable, we would still have 21,000,000,000,000 of Satoshis in circulation.