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lsparrish comments on Making money with Bitcoin? - Less Wrong Discussion
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The last block that will generate coins should be generated around year 2140. See Bitcoin FAQ
In that case, it is likely that the coins will become insecure due to advances in cryptoanalysis and computers well before they run out of coins.
Presumably the software will be modified to use SHA-512 or more advanced encryption algorithms if SHA-256 becomes insecure.
Right, and then the number of possible coins goes up. That's the point. They likely won't actually run into this limit.
Right they won't run out of coins, but the number of coins is still not going to go above 21 million. Rather they'll generate smaller and smaller fractions of coins. Compensation will primarily come from transaction fees.
What is the social process for making this sort of decision? What recourse is available to dissenters? You can fork an open source software project, but you can't fork an economy.
Essentially you would have to convince holders of more than 50% of the computing power to upgrade to the new version in order to change the way it works. Most likely this wouldn't be easily possible without holding the number of coins below the original maximum.
Alternatively, various bitcoin clones could pop up, and one of them might take over the market just because it is better in some respect (e.g. more secure, faster, or easier to use). In fact there's no inherent reason there couldn't be thousands of novel currencies competing and trading against each other.
Sure you can. It just isn't very pretty. That's a major reason why governments generally like to control currency. Forking currency can be quite bad. The good news is that when one doesn't have physical currency having two different cryptographic currencies in circulation shouldn't be hard to deal with. One could even imagine software the converts between them nearly seamlessly.
Well, I said "you can't fork an economy", which I still think is true, but you make a good point that forking the currency is possible and may be good enough.