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The fixed supply is the most interesting aspect. There could be an extremely huge gold deposit, or someone could figure out how to extract it from the ocean eff

The fixed supply is the most interesting aspect. There could be an extremely huge gold deposit, or someone could figure out how to extract it from the ocean efficiently, or an asteroid / planet made of gold discovered and mined. But there will never be more bitcoin. More bitcoin would just fork the chain, and it wouldn't be bitcoin anymore.

WorldMaker 6y ago
Forks are so easy in practice though that it seems magic/wishful thinking to assume there's anything particularly special about one branch's artificial scarcity. It seems axiomatic that in using a tree-based structure branches should be the natural and expected state and pretending the other branches don't exist is a fascinating strategy that I just have a rough time thinking holds over the long term, especially when trying to maintain something like artificial scarcity.
- keymone 6y ago
  Fork of bitcoin is not bitcoin. Only 21 million bitcoin will ever exist and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether that 21 million bitcoin branch will remain the dominant in terms of use and hashpower is under question, but there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
  - WorldMaker 6y ago
    My exact point is that this is a fun "semantic" game. From a technical standpoint, the entire merkle tree is bitcoin, because that is the root data structure, however you want to "brand" individual forks/branches they are always going to be inter-related. The fact that forks already exist today seems to clearly undermine the idea that there are "only ever 21 million bitcoin" because even just taking "Bitcoin Gold" and "Bitcoin Cash" into account alone represent an "additional" 42 million possible bitcoin. (That's before you take in the dozens of other bitcoin forks, and the larger picture of how generally non-scarce cryptocoins are in the general forest beyond the bitcoin tree.) It doesn't really matter which fork is "dominant", the artificial scarcity seems extremely artificial in a most brittle way and not that scarce from a respectable technical viewpoint. You can certainly try to build a definition of "dominant" based on mining "hashpower", but that's a social/economic/political/geopolitical minefield much more than it is a technical factor inherent to bitcoin's underlying data structure, because the underlying data structure is forks ("dominance" is a lucky/expedient edge case).
    - keymone 6y ago
      You are confused. If you try spending bitcoin cash on bitcoin network you will fail, because bitcoin cash utxos are not bitcoin utxos and bitcoin cash is not bitcoin. There are no additional 42 mil bitcoin, there are additional 42 mil of some other tokens spendable on some other networks.
      - WorldMaker 6y ago
        I don't think I am confused. I told you I have a different viewpoint on this. You are claiming different branches of the same tree are magically distinct from each other because they have different names and magic runes sketched into them with a pencil, and all I see is a single tree in a huge forest full of trees. I don't think I'm going to convince you of my viewpoint, but my viewpoint is not confused. You aren't likely to convince me that one branch is more scarce than the others because I can see how big the whole tree is, and especially because I can see how many other trees are in the forest already. (ETA: To make it clearer, you especially aren't going to convince me because I think Proof of Work is a waste of processing power. The real scarcity is processing power, and again, that's a political/economic game, that only props up artificial scarcity so far. Certainly not far enough that I trust the bitcoin tree to remain scarce in the long run. Not a question of if, but a question of when.)
        monokh 6y ago
        Your viewpoint on forks doesn't really check out. It's based on a misunderstanding of how related these forks are to Bitcoin. Anything that forks off of bitcoin is an entirely separate network, asset and market. You can in fact fork Bitcoin today and attempt to create a market, will your new coin be valued as a Bitcoin and derive its current ~9000 USD price? So the value of a fork coin is not in its approximation to Bitcoin. It's merely tied to how much fire power you have to convince others to buy it. Regardless of how you personally view the best use of cpu cycles, the market overwhelmingly disagrees. The network total hashrate has done nothing but go up and to the right since inception. Which is to say, that the market also disagrees with your theory that Bitcoin will lose scarcity (therefore value) over time. Based on which signs or hypothetical scenario are you imagining that this whole systems turns back on itself and breaks?

WorldMaker 6y ago

Forks are so easy in practice though that it seems magic/wishful thinking to assume there's anything particularly special about one branch's artificial scarcity. It seems axiomatic that in using a tree-based structure branches should be the natural and expected state and pretending the other branches don't exist is a fascinating strategy that I just have a rough time thinking holds over the long term, especially when trying to maintain something like artificial scarcity.

keymone 6y ago
Fork of bitcoin is not bitcoin. Only 21 million bitcoin will ever exist and that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. Whether that 21 million bitcoin branch will remain the dominant in terms of use and hashpower is under question, but there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin.
- WorldMaker 6y ago
  My exact point is that this is a fun "semantic" game. From a technical standpoint, the entire merkle tree is bitcoin, because that is the root data structure, however you want to "brand" individual forks/branches they are always going to be inter-related. The fact that forks already exist today seems to clearly undermine the idea that there are "only ever 21 million bitcoin" because even just taking "Bitcoin Gold" and "Bitcoin Cash" into account alone represent an "additional" 42 million possible bitcoin. (That's before you take in the dozens of other bitcoin forks, and the larger picture of how generally non-scarce cryptocoins are in the general forest beyond the bitcoin tree.) It doesn't really matter which fork is "dominant", the artificial scarcity seems extremely artificial in a most brittle way and not that scarce from a respectable technical viewpoint. You can certainly try to build a definition of "dominant" based on mining "hashpower", but that's a social/economic/political/geopolitical minefield much more than it is a technical factor inherent to bitcoin's underlying data structure, because the underlying data structure is forks ("dominance" is a lucky/expedient edge case).
  - keymone 6y ago
    You are confused. If you try spending bitcoin cash on bitcoin network you will fail, because bitcoin cash utxos are not bitcoin utxos and bitcoin cash is not bitcoin. There are no additional 42 mil bitcoin, there are additional 42 mil of some other tokens spendable on some other networks.
    - WorldMaker 6y ago
      I don't think I am confused. I told you I have a different viewpoint on this. You are claiming different branches of the same tree are magically distinct from each other because they have different names and magic runes sketched into them with a pencil, and all I see is a single tree in a huge forest full of trees. I don't think I'm going to convince you of my viewpoint, but my viewpoint is not confused. You aren't likely to convince me that one branch is more scarce than the others because I can see how big the whole tree is, and especially because I can see how many other trees are in the forest already. (ETA: To make it clearer, you especially aren't going to convince me because I think Proof of Work is a waste of processing power. The real scarcity is processing power, and again, that's a political/economic game, that only props up artificial scarcity so far. Certainly not far enough that I trust the bitcoin tree to remain scarce in the long run. Not a question of if, but a question of when.)
      - monokh 6y ago
        Your viewpoint on forks doesn't really check out. It's based on a misunderstanding of how related these forks are to Bitcoin. Anything that forks off of bitcoin is an entirely separate network, asset and market. You can in fact fork Bitcoin today and attempt to create a market, will your new coin be valued as a Bitcoin and derive its current ~9000 USD price? So the value of a fork coin is not in its approximation to Bitcoin. It's merely tied to how much fire power you have to convince others to buy it. Regardless of how you personally view the best use of cpu cycles, the market overwhelmingly disagrees. The network total hashrate has done nothing but go up and to the right since inception. Which is to say, that the market also disagrees with your theory that Bitcoin will lose scarcity (therefore value) over time. Based on which signs or hypothetical scenario are you imagining that this whole systems turns back on itself and breaks?