Hacker News Reader

Comment by akira2501 | Hacker News Reader

Aside from Satoshi's hoard.. there's also just regular destruction. Units can be mined and then permanently lost. The system has a limited number of units that can be generated in total and no mechanism to replace the lost units.

Why is this not a long term problem for bitcoin?

View on HN

I love how everyone responding to you seems to think that this is fine because you can just continue dividing the currency, as if the problem is a technical one, and seem to be ignoring or unaware of the actual problem:

Constant deflation is HORRIBLE for any economic system. By design it rewards early capital holders and punishes you for needing to make any transaction. It disincentivizes doing anything. You are always better off not spending money. This may sound good to idiots who just like "line goes up", but that makes normal people not use that system if they have the option.

Bitcoin, by design either on purpose or through negligence and a lack of basic economic knowledge can only ever reward the original whales and harm normal users of the system. Hoarding is the only rational position. That's what crypto proponents push for, because they are already bought in and want to reap the rewards. It's always hilarious and infuriating when they claim this system is more equal, more distributed, or more egalitarian than any other.

Sounds a lot like VTSAX. But somehow people still buy food and shelter even though they could put their money in VTSAX instead and get 7% returns.

Either way less spending sounds good to me. We could use a world with more saving and less consumerism.

> But somehow people still buy food and shelter even though they could put their money in VTSAX instead and get 7% returns.

Silly people, needing a roof over their heads and nutrition.

> We could use a world with more saving and less consumerism.

Everyone saving more would be disastrous for global human welfare. It won't preserve resources in any meaningful way and would set society back generations. If that's your goal, great.

But what we need to do instead is shift toward consuming sustainably. That might mean consuming less in some instances, but in a many cases it means consuming differently, especially in how we consume energy.

Right, money needs to circulate to everyone so that people can afford to spend their lives on other than subsistence work. Saving primarily benefits the saver (secondarily those who take out loans).

I also find it infuriating when crypto fans defend the massive advantage afforded to early miners. To me the only truly fair distribution is one where the rewards never change; later generations of miners should get the same reward as those mining right after genesis, rather than fight over crumbs. A pure linear emission doesn't really make money any less sound [1].

[1] https://john-tromp.medium.com/a-case-for-using-soft-total-su...

It's divisible down to 0.00000001.

If that ever became a significant issue I imagine users would be happy to increase the precision via a fork.

LN supports sub satoshi (i.e. higher precision) payments on L2.

If you're talking about the numbers getting super small and being unwieldy, most fiat currencies have the opposite problem of the numbers getting super large, they just redenominate every now and then.

>It's divisible down to 0.00000001.

This is an artifact of the implementation. I don't think there's any real reason it couldn't be divided further using higher precision.

Yes.

In the implementation the units are actually integers, 1 is the minimum.

Could easily fork in a new transaction format though.

1. As other people mention Bitcoin is highly divisible. 2. Other Bitcoins simply becomes more valuable and thus strengthening the system

Because the units are highly divisible and the divisibility can be increased easily if it becomes necessary.

When someone loses/destroys bitcoin, they are effectively donating the value to everyone else who still holds bitcoin.

Infinitely divisible

Reply on news.ycombinator.com