-- I can't speak to the economic implications of limiting # of bitcoins to only 21 million -- it's probably based on the fixed rate of coin generation and the desire to have it stop by 2016. ---
Bitcoins are generated until 2140.
--- Also, if you are serious about making a currency for the whole internet, 21 million seems like a few order of magnitude too small due to number of participants. --
Each coin is made up of 100,000,000 atomic units, so using the bitcoin denomination is arbitrary, and smaller denominations can be used as the value of a bitcoin increases.
The author also writes:
-- Due to the cryptographic nature of transactions, it's simply not possible to have realtime transactions with bitcoin as the network scales (it already take 5-10 mins on average for the network to see a single transaction). --
When transactions were never meant to be real-time.
The only criticism that is valid IMO is this:
-- Having the ability to upgrade algos is really, really important IMO. As it stands, the entire bitcoin economy would go to zero, nearly instantaneously, if SHA-256 is broken. There MUST be a way for the network stay ahead of crypto changes and improve security over time. Rotation of currency, as in the real world, must be designed in. --
But he offers no means of doing this while maintaining a decentralized network.
