Why do we repeat the claim of Bitcoin scarcity when we all know it's just a promise and nothing more, there is no technical limitation?
All it takes to "print" more Bitcoins is for the majority of miners to agree to make a fork that will allow for more. And that will happen at one point.
As for Gold, good luck trying to mine an infinite amount of it.
What you would have at that point isn't Bitcoin, it would be probably be called "Bitcoin infinite" or something, similar to "Bitcoin cash".
If a block size change caused the split into Bitcoin cash, you can only imagine what a cap change on Bitcoin available will cause, 21M cap is a lot less controversial than block sizes.
The miners by comparison, drop off the old BTC network making difficulty go down and others can now mine BTC.
Certainly miners can make this decision. What they can't do is force the market to value the new fork as worth anything, while they are burning energy to mine it and wasting opportunity cost of abandoning finite BTC.
How is this an actual threat? Doesn't make sense.
Oh just that huh?
The market wouldn't value that new fork on par with finite BTC, so those miners would be hurting themselves, and burning energy for a worth-less coin.
This action is trivial to consider, so what makes you think it has bearing on BTC value? When these miners leave old network, hash power & difficulty go down so other miners who prefer finite protocol can come in to mine. What's the actual threat then?
If financial intermediaries like Coinbase start extending credit or engaging in fractional reserve banking, then yes, you can “create more Bitcoin.”
Just like how in the gold standard, you could still create more gold backed dollars by making a mortgage loan...
Kind of funny how all these new monetary wizards miss out on this simple fact.
EDIT: I was obviously not the first to say this but it is really interesting to watch the crypo space re-invent all of modern finance, one piece at a time.
"not your keys not your Bitcoin" has been a mantra from the beginning. You can track BTC withdrawals from exchanges. Ability to possess your own BTC quickly and easily is a primary feature of Bitcoin that separates it from gold and fractionally reserved fiat.
Fractionally reserved Gold happens because gold is heavy, hard to transport, store, and secure. This leads to centralized storage and then fractional reserve. You do see how the lack of physical properties, especially in contrast to gold, make the comparison much different in regards to willingness and ability to withdraw BTC and self store?
Again, a physical gold bank run, vs a BTC bank run are so massively different due to fundamental properties that this is a comically absurd threat comparison.
With bitcoin, the only "authority" that confirms who owns what is the blockchain. Nobody would have to accept that you have made a bitcoin payment just because you transferred some bitcoin based credit that is not actually bitcoin.
Of course bitcoin derived credit/securities/IOUs can work. But it's not the same as bitcoin unless there are laws that ban making that distinction in some context.
The real elephant in the room is that new crypto currencies are being printed left and right. We may have a finite number of Bitcoin (in a couple decades) but one look at the list of crypto currencies will show that the number of crypto coins in general continues to explode at a phenomenal rate.
Even if 80% of miners wanted something, if it was egregious enough, like a change in supply, then no one would go along with it. Ecommerce companies like Coinbase etc would just ignore the fork and keep going with the remaining 20% of miners whose heads are screwed on straight.
Those 80% of rebel miners who are burning all that energy, and have all that sunk cost in hardware, would be stuck mining a nothing coin that no one wants, and would lose everything almost immediately.
Remember, miners have sunk costs. They, more than anyone, need the coin to retain value. Their incentives are incredibly aligned with everyone else in the ecosystem.
Biggest barrier to more gold is technology. There's a ton of it in space.
If it forked in a way that completely defeated the limited supply and led to rapid inflation then it would massively tank in value and miners would lose a lot of money. That’s a pretty good incentive for them not to destroy it.
As far as bitcoin existential threats go, there are many of them - the energy cost, a 51% attack, so much concentration of mining in China, etc. Miners mutually colluding to destroy their own investments is not at the top of my list of worries.
Please do a 2 minute read of the BCH wikipedia page and correct your comment.
Why?
Why is this a bad thing? America's founders believed that the people could mint their own coins.
I'd also posit that "because America does it" is a fairly weak argument for many of the claimed benefits of Bitcoin. Much of Bitcoin's charter is that it helps move away from government-controlled currency. If you think America's monetary system is the best option available, then Bitcoin likely is not your thing.
