The core Bitcoin holders don’t want more coins, so it won’t happen. Simple as that.
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.
My sincere hope is that this signals the death of crypto in popular culture. I'm sure it'll always have a niche but up until now and for the foreseeable future there aren't any actual useful mass use cases for crypto.
The drop in crypto ad spend is an interesting (and meaningful) indicator of market sentiment. I'm thinking we won't be seeing 2023 Superbowl crypto.com ads. I could be wrong.
There's what? 20,000 coins? Most of them will die in the short term if they haven't already.
So I don't know if Bitcoin will continue crashing or stabilize. No one does. If they did they'd make a ton of money. In the very least I'd bet the bear market will continue for awhile but at some point Bitcoin or some successor will roar back to life.
Bitcoin is limited at 21 million coins. After that, no more btc, and people will trade in btc divisions such as satoshis. But there are hundrerds of bitcoin alternatives now, some very interesting.
That's my point - the thing that makes bitcoin "scarce" is not that there is a fundamental limit to the number of bitcoin-like tokens that exist, it's just that there's inertia against creating more.
I don't mean "if we collectively wanted to" to suggest that people will just up and choose to do so tomorrow, only to say that it's that lack of collective will, rather than true scarcity, that restricts the number of bitcoins.
Here’s what I don’t understand. I’m genuinely looking for an explanation for this.
Let’s assume everything works great for BTC. BTC is designed to eventually max out the number of coins. I believe the current expectation is that no more coins will be issued by 2040.
What happens after that? If no more coins are issued, there’s no incentive to mine. And if there is no more mining then there will be no more transactions.
Will the BTC blockchain just freeze at that point? If so why will it have any value any more?
I’m not sure what the ideal expectations are beyond this scenario.
No matter your take on bitcoin's long-term viability (or lack thereof), it can hardly be argued that this isn't damn interesting to watch unfold.
A cryptocurrency with zero backing that exists only in digital form is now worth many billions of dollars. Is it a bubble? Will this foment a currency revolution of sorts? If it doesn't crash, how will governments react? If it does crash, what will replace it? Obviously there is a demand for a decentralized currency, and as more people realize that something like this is possible, I can only see demand for it going one way: up. Most people have never even heard of bitcoin; I've only talked to a few people in my own life who are even familiar with the word, and fewer still who know what it actually is. Yet with even such a small awareness, bitcoin's value has grown from zero to billions in a few years. Unless governments step in and find some way to put the kibosh on decentralized currencies in general, it seems unlikely that demand is going to shrink as awareness continues to increase. We're so used to governments essentially owning currencies that it is very difficult to imagine a world where they don't, but obviously, if cryptocurrencies take off in a big way, the implications for the future are profound.
Also interesting: since the total number of Bitcoins is fixed, as more and more coins are used for crime and get blacklisted, the value of remaining coins will become inflated. Given a long enough timeline, there will be too few coins for the currency to remain useful.
(Though to be fair, people simply losing the private keys to their wallet also has the same effect. Not sure which phenomenon would, over time, result in more coin losses.)
Bitcoins probably won't take off (cf the failures of all the other alternative digital currencies so far), but the whole number of bitcoins is no more a roadblock than the limited number of ounces of gold in the world was to getting everyone using gold as currency. The problems basically lie elsewhere.
Bitcoin is likely going to remain the most conservative of all the cryptocurrencies. Even the most liberial of them is having trouble scaling to the current demand. The current demand is really quite low.
It's possible for sure, but with Bitcoin and the overall crypto space steadily growing in value into the trillions over the course of over a decade, it seems unlikely.
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.
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