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Comment by mr_spothawk | Hacker News Reader

while the supply of digital coins is infinite (you could fork btc, or any other chain, or create different coins that could then be forked) the supply of Bitcoins is finite & knowable. this is a component of the argument by "maximalists" who suggest that alternate coins/tokens are bullshit by design, and anybody who thinks they aren't is necessarily in favor of inflationary money.

> Objects in the real world have utility that's directly linked to their unit value.

Could you explain what this means to you? I don't understand what you're saying

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Bigger diamonds are more desirable than larger diamonds, not because of the price, but because they look better and are sparklier and harder to lose and all sorts of other real-world metrics.

If I want $1000 of bitcoin, I don't care whether that value is in 1 BTC, 100BTC, or 0.0001BTC. They are otherwise identical to me.

Therefore, the fact that the total of all bitcoins in circulation can't exceed 23 million is irrelevant unless you care about the value of 1 BTC, which is only the case if you are trying to sell them for more than you paid.

What he said above: unless you have a long or short position, you don't care whether you get a full unit or some fraction thereof.

There are some elements of behavior economics that counter this - people like to buy lower-priced coins and stocks because they get "more" of them, from a unit perspective. But rationally, there's no reason to consider 1 BTC @ $10 any different from 0.1 BTC @ $100, hence the number of "units" seems potentially irrelevant.

but is the same not true of trading USD for EUR? If I want $1000 of EUR, I don't care whether that is 1 EUR, 100, or .01. The value is in the ecosystem.

Bitcoin is still at the beginning of the beginning of any sort of ecosystem. Everyone expects way more from it than is possible. It is/will deliver on the things it is designed to.

You're correct that I don't care about the value of 1 BTC (or 1 EUR) unless I can sell it, but you imply only selling it for USD again. When it is widespread enough to be a currency, you can 'sell' it for goods and services.

Yes, but people argue that the finite supply of Bitcoin is a fundamental advantage vs. currencies. The supply of a currency isn't really infinite, but it's quite flexible when you consider that giving credit effectively "creates" more currency and expands the monetary supply. (I'm not clear why BTC won't eventually have this issue as well if folks start lending / borrowing it.) All the BTC really avoid is increases in the monetary supply via the printing of additional currency, which is arguably a feature of traditional money, in that the central government can intentionally tighten or ease the monetary supply to help manage economic volatility.

while the supply of digital coins is infinite (you could fork btc, or any other chain, or create different coins that could then be forked)

This is bull. It's not zero cost to fork a cryptocurrency. It's not zero cost to mine. The supply of a digital good might well be very large. However, it will most certainly be finite.

You could fork the cryptocurrency and let miners decide their reward.

Then you're limited to "What's the biggest number that a miner can name in the finite amount of memory available?", which has the ultimate limit of a Busy Beaver function.

BB(n) for n > 1500 behaves like an infinity in many important ways.

Then you're limited to "What's the biggest number that a miner can name in the finite amount of memory available?"

Then just apply my original argument. It's not zero cost to mine. It's not zero cost to fork. The supply of cryptocurrency will be very large, but it will be so many x orders of magnitude smaller than BB(kerjillion), that x itself might be larger than the number of every cryptocoin ever made and every cryptocoin that ever will be made.

The useful thinking is about the computational limits of our current civilization, not infinities or redonkulous numbers.

You don't need to fork it, or mine it. You just use a smaller amount.

My point was that other traditional "store of values" have inherent value based on their utility per amount, which means that the finite supply has implications for people who want to use it. Bitcoin doesn't have that - it's purely useful in terms of what you can trade it for (much like a dollar.) Hence the fact that there's only so many "units" is kind of uninteresting, because a fractional unit is no less useful.

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