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Comment by frankenst1 | Hacker News Reader

Nocoiner Frances Coppola:

    "Bitcoin is not scarce because each coin is subdivided into satoshis".

These comments are entertaining but seem to get more ridiculous with every year.

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Kinda depends on what you mean by scarce. Expensive? Subdivision doesn't help. Illiquid? satoshis help there.

The quote uses the word "scarce" in a way that implies that the supply isn't limited, which is obviously false.

I use a similar trick to save money by ordering a small and cutting it into 50 pieces.

*more desperate every year

I mean you can't technically guarantee the scarcity of bitcoin. Even though it is the source code that there should be 21 million, you can just fork the repo and start again from scratch and call the first bitcoins mined epoch-1 and subsequent coins as bitcoin epoch-n. The public will come to understand any coins mined using the bitcoin protocol as bitcoins if this comes to pass.

Forks of Bitcoin have already happened multiple times. Bitcoin Cash and Bitcoin SV also claim to be the original Bitcoin, but the mainstream view is that the chain with the highest hashpower, highest trading volume and highest price is the real Bitcoin. Which chain is the real Bitcoin is entirely determined by the community and I don't see a plausible future where a sizeable chunk of the community agrees to increase the max supply.

I'm not too deep into this world, and you can correct me if I'm wrong but weren't those forks of the ledger due to technological disagreements and not folks starting over from scratch? Has anyone said, we are literally copying the exact same protocol and tech from bitcoin and just say this is another parallel version? As an end user why would you care if coins were in epoch-1 or epoch-2 if they perform the same exact function with the exact same underlying technology?

This is a rabbit hole, but the TL;DR is that it's very resilient against precisely these types of attacks.

How would what I'm describing be classified as an "attack"?

Every time it's been done, it's clearly an attempt by the developers to profit. Why else would one duplicate something, hardly change it, but attempt to pass it off as the original thing?

I mean technically in this case it's just another copy of the original thing no need/want to try and deceive people. In the long run all bitcoin will be lost. You could also parallelize transactions which I believe is still a problem in the cryptocurrency community.

>weren't those forks of the ledger due to technological disagreements

That's their PR message, not their goal. They were pretty clearly social attacks trying to coopt the name.

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