Bitcoins - about to hit $5,000 per coin today!

[obsidian]

Google and understand the infinite slicing of a pizza.

Imagine BTC cap is 1 trillion, and a collective decision was made to double the number of tokens. Every token holder would now own (either via the mainchain, or via newly branched chain), the exact same share of BTC, only now represented by double the tokens. So, if you had 100 tokens, at 100K each (= $10m), you now would have 200 tokens, at 50K each (= $10m). Its the same reason why Eth (and many alts) "yield" is a misleading scam (the issuance being offset by dilution),

Use your brain. If you own BTC, you automatically will own all and any of its derivatives. We've all been through that. Would Blackrock, in such a case, simply allow you to keep the main chain, and "burn" or "sell" or just keep the side chain? Theoretically possible, but most likely they would just add it to the ETF (or in some way pay it out). Hence all the legal disclaimers. So, always best to self custody. Always remember NYKNOC.

Back at $125K.

That's not how it works. There's a 21 million BTC cap on the Bitcoin chain. A hard fork would be required to remove the cap, and perhaps allow for tail emissions to prevent miners from abandoning BTC mining.

Any change to the 21 M rule is a hard fork — meaning nodes that don’t upgrade will reject blocks that mint more than 21 M.

In practice, this means two chains would exist:

• One honoring the original cap (classic BTC).
• One with the new inflationary rules.

Gib, a person with say 100 BTC would still only have 100 BTC on the original Bitcoin chain with the finite cap. They could also potentially get another 100 tokens of the Bitcoin chain with the infinite supply if they had self custody of their BTC. I am not sure they would receive any new tokens if their BTC was on an exchange at the time of the fork.

If miners decide to reject the new chain, then they can continue to mine at a loss or go bankrupt and be forced to quit. Electricity, hardware, and infrastructure is not free. Bitcoin would then be vulnerable to 51% attacks as miners fall off.

After 16 years, the fee market hasn’t proven itself. The sustainability of the “finite cap + fee-only” model is an open question, and it’s one of Bitcoin’s biggest long-term risks. The 21M cap isn’t just an economic design choice — it’s a social contract. If that’s broken, Bitcoin’s main value prop (digital scarcity) could collapse.

[gib]

That's not how it works. There's a 21 million BTC cap on the Bitcoin chain. A hard fork would be required to remove the cap, and perhaps allow for tail emissions to prevent miners from abandoning BTC mining.

Any change to the 21 M rule is a hard fork — meaning nodes that don’t upgrade will reject blocks that mint more than 21 M.

In practice, this means two chains would exist:

• One honoring the original cap (classic BTC).
• One with the new inflationary rules.

Gib, a person with say 100 BTC would still only have 100 BTC on the original Bitcoin chain with the finite cap. They could also potentially get another 100 tokens of the Bitcoin chain with the infinite supply if they had self custody of their BTC. I am not sure they would receive any new tokens if their BTC was on an exchange at the time of the fork.

If miners decide to reject the new chain, then they can continue to mine at a loss or go bankrupt and be forced to quit. Electricity, hardware, and infrastructure is not free. Bitcoin would then be vulnerable to 51% attacks as miners fall off.

After 16 years, the fee market hasn’t proven itself. The sustainability of the “finite cap + fee-only” model is an open question, and it’s one of Bitcoin’s biggest long-term risks. The 21M cap isn’t just an economic design choice — it’s a social contract. If that’s broken, Bitcoin’s main value prop (digital scarcity) could collapse.

Lol you are hilarious Obsidian, with these half truths.

I'll try and make it simple. Imagine you own a tree, from the trunk upwards. Any new branches, twigs, leaves etc on that tree belong to you as they connect to the trunk. So, for example, I received every single part of the Bitcoin Cash fork that was created from the fork back in 2017. I sold most of it, (more out of principle), but I could have kept it. For my BTC on exchange, there was a period of uncertainty - I think the exchange said initially they "would not support it", but eventually they did, and of course anything I held directly, no issue. Hence the importance of NYKNYC (or to very clearly understand any agreement you have and obligations of any custodian you keep your coins with). This is also the reason for the often misunderstood disclaimer you see with ETFs like Blackrock's iBit or exchanges like Coinbase. Ie - they do not want to be obliged to support any forks. In reality they likely would, or would sell to buy more BTC, or simply refund in cash. MSTR I expect would likely keep any and all forks, just to be safe (and for the trunk and branches principle I mentioned above). Don't get confused though - its all still one tree. (Just like the pizza is still one pizza no matter how slices it is, and 1 kg of gold is still one kg, no matter how many portions its broken into).

I will respond to the rest of the nonsense later regarding mining, but in short mining is very profitable for anyone that does it below the average cost (hence there is a never ending race to efficiency and free energy), and provided price doubles every 4 years, mining yield (assuming all things being even) means same value will be unlocked each halving (all other things being equal). You keep failing to see the wood through the trees. Mining is supposed to be "difficult", and we have a difficulty adjustment which swings both ways, depending on supply and demand, which assures support of the network.

You will maybe still be asking "oh but what about x,y,z when the USD has fallen to 1m USD to BTC. I'll simply be there with my coins. You still have the chance to come join me. Or will you be there instead with a deflated bag of "the next best thing" and telling stories to your kids of how close you were, but backed the wrong horse...

See you at 125K.

[FitnessFrenzy]

[obsidian]

Lol you are hilarious Obsidian, with these half truths.

I'll try and make it simple. Imagine you own a tree, from the trunk upwards. Any new branches, twigs, leaves etc on that tree belong to you as they connect to the trunk. So, for example, I received every single part of the Bitcoin Cash fork that was created from the fork back in 2017. I sold most of it, (more out of principle), but I could have kept it. For my BTC on exchange, there was a period of uncertainty - I think the exchange said initially they "would not support it", but eventually they did, and of course anything I held directly, no issue. Hence the importance of NYKNYC (or to very clearly understand any agreement you have and obligations of any custodian you keep your coins with). This is also the reason for the often misunderstood disclaimer you see with ETFs like Blackrock's iBit or exchanges like Coinbase. Ie - they do not want to be obliged to support any forks. In reality they likely would, or would sell to buy more BTC, or simply refund in cash. MSTR I expect would likely keep any and all forks, just to be safe (and for the trunk and branches principle I mentioned above). Don't get confused though - its all still one tree. (Just like the pizza is still one pizza no matter how slices it is, and 1 kg of gold is still one kg, no matter how many portions its broken into).

I will respond to the rest of the nonsense later regarding mining, but in short mining is very profitable for anyone that does it below the average cost (hence there is a never ending race to efficiency and free energy), and provided price doubles every 4 years, mining yield (assuming all things being even) means same value will be unlocked each halving (all other things being equal). You keep failing to see the wood through the trees. Mining is supposed to be "difficult", and we have a difficulty adjustment which swings both ways, depending on supply and demand, which assures support of the network.

You will maybe still be asking "oh but what about x,y,z when the USD has fallen to 1m USD to BTC. I'll simply be there with my coins. You still have the chance to come join me. Or will you be there instead with a deflated bag of "the next best thing" and telling stories to your kids of how close you were, but backed the wrong horse...

See you at 125K.

“Free energy” doesn’t exist. Even solar or hydro require capital, maintenance, and eventual replacement — miners still pay for it.

The idea that BTC doubles every 4 years ignores inflation and halving. To maintain real revenue, the price needs to more than double. Past cycles aligned with adoption and liquidity, but that’s not guaranteed.

Difficulty adjustment keeps blocks at ~10 minutes, but if miners unplug rigs, hash rate drops. Lower difficulty ironically makes a 51% attack cheaper — hardly “security guaranteed.”

BTC isn’t going anywhere soon, but pretending energy is free, price always doubles, and security is automatic isn’t serious analysis.

Here are some quick calculations I did in Excel after importing BTC's historical prices from 2021/01/01 - 2021/09/11 and 2025/01/01 - 2025/09/11. I averaged the closing values for each period.

2021 BTC AVERAGE ADJUSTED CLOSING: $44,594.97
2025 BTC AVERAGE ADJUSTED CLOSING: $101,324.44

2021 BLOCK REWARD: $44,594.97 X 6.25 BTC = $278,718.575
2025 BLOCK REWARD: $101,324.44 X 3.125 BTC = $316,638.88

Now add the cumulative inflation since 2021 - around 24.6%

$278,718.575 x 1.246 = $347,283.34

So the average 2021 BTC Block Reward of $278,718.575 would now be worth $347,283.34. But instead the average 2025 BTC Block Reward is $316,638.88, or $30,644.46 less.

There’s no guarantee this slow bleed in block reward value won’t continue. Meanwhile, Ethereum secures its network with far less power consumption while providing orders of magnitude more economic security. Attacking BTC only gets cheaper as hash rate drops, and unlike BTC, ETH has slashing penalties for dishonest validators. It’s surprising more people don’t see the long-term security crisis Bitcoin is heading toward.

[obsidian]

Haha! His face is a little light.

[gib]

“Free energy” doesn’t exist. Even solar or hydro require capital, maintenance, and eventual replacement — miners still pay for it.

The idea that BTC doubles every 4 years ignores inflation and halving. To maintain real revenue, the price needs to more than double. Past cycles aligned with adoption and liquidity, but that’s not guaranteed.

Difficulty adjustment keeps blocks at ~10 minutes, but if miners unplug rigs, hash rate drops. Lower difficulty ironically makes a 51% attack cheaper — hardly “security guaranteed.”

BTC isn’t going anywhere soon, but pretending energy is free, price always doubles, and security is automatic isn’t serious analysis.

Here are some quick calculations I did in Excel after importing BTC's historical prices from 2021/01/01 - 2021/09/11 and 2025/01/01 - 2025/09/11. I averaged the closing values for each period.

2021 BTC AVERAGE ADJUSTED CLOSING: $44,594.97
2025 BTC AVERAGE ADJUSTED CLOSING: $101,324.44

2021 BLOCK REWARD: $44,594.97 X 6.25 BTC = $278,718.575
2025 BLOCK REWARD: $101,324.44 X 3.125 BTC = $316,638.88

Now add the cumulative inflation since 2021 - around 24.6%

$278,718.575 x 1.246 = $347,283.34

So the average 2021 BTC Block Reward of $278,718.575 would now be worth $347,283.34. But instead the average 2025 BTC Block Reward is $316,638.88, or $30,644.46 less.

There’s no guarantee this slow bleed in block reward value won’t continue. Meanwhile, Ethereum secures its network with far less power consumption while providing orders of magnitude more economic security. Attacking BTC only gets cheaper as hash rate drops, and unlike BTC, ETH has slashing penalties for dishonest validators. It’s surprising more people don’t see the long-term security crisis Bitcoin is heading toward.

You are (deliberately?) missing the point. BTC is backed by the scarcity of energy. That's the whole point. Energy is required to mine, and coins cannot just printed out of thin air (unlike ETH or most other shit coins). Hence the "proof of work" which backs the coin. The "greed" to mine is always the incentive, which in turn leads to protection of the network. And the beauty of capitalism is that miners will obviously always gravitate to cheaper supply of energy, and more efficient ways to mine.

Come on Obsidian - you know this stuff. Stop trying to mislead me, and stop taking advantage of the fact that I will not be back to address your comments until 125K.

You can see global hashrate here. Zoom out to all time, and you will something beautiful...

https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart

See you at 125.

[obsidian]

You are (deliberately?) missing the point. BTC is backed by the scarcity of energy. That's the whole point. Energy is required to mine, and coins cannot just printed out of thin air (unlike ETH or most other shit coins). Hence the "proof of work" which backs the coin. The "greed" to mine is always the incentive, which in turn leads to protection of the network. And the beauty of capitalism is that miners will obviously always gravitate to cheaper supply of energy, and more efficient ways to mine.

Come on Obsidian - you know this stuff. Stop trying to mislead me, and stop taking advantage of the fact that I will not be back to address your comments until 125K.

You can see global hashrate here. Zoom out to all time, and you will something beautiful...

https://www.coinwarz.com/mining/bitcoin/hashrate-chart

See you at 125.

ETH isn’t “printed out of thin air.” New ETH is issued as rewards to validators who stake ETH and confirm blocks. This is similar to Bitcoin miners earning block rewards, except Ethereum uses proof-of-stake (PoS) instead of proof-of-work (PoW).

PoS does use electricity — validators still run hardware 24/7 — but the energy footprint is drastically smaller because there’s no competitive hashing race. Instead, validators must lock 32 ETH as collateral, which keeps them honest: if they try to attack the network, their stake gets slashed.

Attacking Ethereum is actually more expensive than attacking Bitcoin, and attacks are noticed and punished in real time. By contrast, a Bitcoin 51% attack might not be detected until blocks are successfully reorganized, and there’s no slashing penalty — the attacker just loses whatever they spent on electricity and hardware.

[Griffith]

That's not how it works. There's a 21 million BTC cap on the Bitcoin chain. A hard fork would be required to remove the cap, and perhaps allow for tail emissions to prevent miners from abandoning BTC mining.

Any change to the 21 M rule is a hard fork — meaning nodes that don’t upgrade will reject blocks that mint more than 21 M.

In practice, this means two chains would exist:

• One honoring the original cap (classic BTC).
• One with the new inflationary rules.

Gib, a person with say 100 BTC would still only have 100 BTC on the original Bitcoin chain with the finite cap. They could also potentially get another 100 tokens of the Bitcoin chain with the infinite supply if they had self custody of their BTC. I am not sure they would receive any new tokens if their BTC was on an exchange at the time of the fork.

If miners decide to reject the new chain, then they can continue to mine at a loss or go bankrupt and be forced to quit. Electricity, hardware, and infrastructure is not free. Bitcoin would then be vulnerable to 51% attacks as miners fall off.

After 16 years, the fee market hasn’t proven itself. The sustainability of the “finite cap + fee-only” model is an open question, and it’s one of Bitcoin’s biggest long-term risks. The 21M cap isn’t just an economic design choice — it’s a social contract. If that’s broken, Bitcoin’s main value prop (digital scarcity) could collapse.

If/when the supply of BTC is increased from 21 million the price would absolutely nuke!

[gib]

If/when the supply of BTC is increased from 21 million the price would absolutely nuke!

I'll try to explain it one last time.

If you suddenly doubled the supply of BTC (ie everyone who has 1 Btc, now has 2), then all things being equal, the BTC price would halve, but you would have the same total value as you would now own double the number of Bitcoin. This is basic economics, much like how a stock spit does not add (or decrease) the market cap of a company. So if you had 10BTC, each worth 100K = total 1m, you would now have 20BTC each worth 50K = total 1m.

Similarly, if you decided to make BTC more divisible, (with BTC currently divided into 100,000,000 Sats), by for example having each of those Sats divided into (for example units of a further 1000, so that 1 Sat = 1000 micro Sats), again, the value of a BTC would remain unchanged. (Google the slice of pizza example if you still really don't get it). This is really basic mathematics 101 - yet for some reason so many are confused by it, and indeed scammers use this phenomenon of confusion to scam people.

Any change to any part of BTC chain accumulates to the holder of BTC - think of the root of a tree (being your BTC), and then various branches of the tree all also belonging to you (provided you continue to hold the trunk). So, always keep your BTC, hodl it, and you will then always own any offshoots. Do not, EVER, sell you BTC for the promise of a "better" off-shoot. You can see what happened with those who failed to retain their BTC but yet bought the Bitcoin Cash fork...

However, to the extent that someone purports to invent an "alt" to BTC, that is another matter. Such "alts" are indeed potentially dilutive to the value of BTC, as global wealth is finite, and so this is where we all need to make sure we adopt a single global of value, being of course BTC (just like we all speak English, as opposed to an infinite number of gibberish languages which someone has tried to make up in the believe we suddenly will all start speaking in gibberish instead of English).

See you at 125k.

[obsidian]

I'll try to explain it one last time.

If you suddenly doubled the supply of BTC (ie everyone who has 1 Btc, now has 2), then all things being equal, the BTC price would halve, but you would have the same total value as you would now own double the number of Bitcoin. This is basic economics, much like how a stock spit does not add (or decrease) the market cap of a company. So if you had 10BTC, each worth 100K = total 1m, you would now have 20BTC each worth 50K = total 1m.

Similarly, if you decided to make BTC more divisible, (with BTC currently divided into 100,000,000 Sats), by for example having each of those Sats divided into (for example units of a further 1000, so that 1 Sat = 1000 micro Sats), again, the value of a BTC would remain unchanged. (Google the slice of pizza example if you still really don't get it). This is really basic mathematics 101 - yet for some reason so many are confused by it, and indeed scammers use this phenomenon of confusion to scam people.

Any change to any part of BTC chain accumulates to the holder of BTC - think of the root of a tree (being your BTC), and then various branches of the tree all also belonging to you (provided you continue to hold the trunk). So, always keep your BTC, hodl it, and you will then always own any offshoots. Do not, EVER, sell you BTC for the promise of a "better" off-shoot. You can see what happened with those who failed to retain their BTC but yet bought the Bitcoin Cash fork...

However, to the extent that someone purports to invent an "alt" to BTC, that is another matter. Such "alts" are indeed potentially dilutive to the value of BTC, as global wealth is finite, and so this is where we all need to make sure we adopt a single global of value, being of course BTC (just like we all speak English, as opposed to an infinite number of gibberish languages which someone has tried to make up in the believe we suddenly will all start speaking in gibberish instead of English).

See you at 125k.

Removing the 21M cap wouldn’t be like a stock split where everyone’s balance doubles. It would just allow miners to keep creating new coins, which dilutes existing holders unless demand rises enough to offset it. That’s closer to money printing than a stock split — which is exactly why the cap is so important to Bitcoin’s value.

Removing the 21M cap ≠ stock split

[gib]

Removing the 21M cap wouldn’t be like a stock split where everyone’s balance doubles. It would just allow miners to keep creating new coins, which dilutes existing holders unless demand rises enough to offset it. That’s closer to money printing than a stock split — which is exactly why the cap is so important to Bitcoin’s value.

Once again, you are confusing concepts. There is a difference between splitting all BTC into 2 - essentially doubling the total amount in circulation in a manner equal to all, vs giving more BTC just to the miners.

In the former example, all you are doing doubling the denominator - total value and market cap remains the same. Every BTC holder would have 2x as much, and every miner would also earn 2x as much, with the halving algorithm remaining intact. In the scenario you seem to be thinking about, only giving miners more and not the existing holders, obviously that is non-sensical, and that would constitute a theft from existing Bitcoiners. (Which by the way is actually one reason why Eth will never function as a trusted store of value).

Think about it like this. Imagine we dealt with gold in 1kg blocks. And then someone decided to deal in 1 gram blocks instead. The market cap of gold remains the same. You have more units, and each unit would be 1000th of a block. But whether a 1kg Unit, or 1000 grams, it is still the same value.

Now, obviously, (in what I think you are referring to), say gold has a market cap of 20 Trillion, and there was suddenly a massive additional gold harvest (perhaps an asteroid, or a massive deposit found underground), which doubled the total supply - in such a case that additional supply would not attribute directly, pari pasu to each existing holder of gold - and so in such a case, obviously (all other things being equal), the value of the existing gold already mined would fall 50%.

In any case, unlike Eth and other "fake BTC alts", we don't need to worry. 21m coins cap is sacred, incentives are aligned on this, and this will not be changed. Somewhat more likely is that we will see "micro-Sats" being used at some time in the future. This could well happen on a layer 2. Currently there are about 350,000 Sats available for every person on earth, on average. So, it will take some time before there is this need for further units beyond a single Sat. But if as we move to global adoption, and BTC being used beyond store value into medium of exchange, we may see demand for microsats increase (and indeed also with the rise of AI and the need to transact with baselayer economic value units over the internet in increasingly smaller amounts).

"Every cycle, there is a new fool. And every cycle, lessons will be learned..."

[Griffith]

Removing the 21M cap wouldn’t be like a stock split where everyone’s balance doubles. It would just allow miners to keep creating new coins, which dilutes existing holders unless demand rises enough to offset it. That’s closer to money printing than a stock split — which is exactly why the cap is so important to Bitcoin’s value.

Removing the 21M cap ≠ stock split

Exactly.

And any hints of news that Bitcoin's 21M cap could be increased would cause a huge sell-off!

[obsidian]

Once again, you are confusing concepts. There is a difference between splitting all BTC into 2 - essentially doubling the total amount in circulation in a manner equal to all, vs giving more BTC just to the miners.

In the former example, all you are doing doubling the denominator - total value and market cap remains the same. Every BTC holder would have 2x as much, and every miner would also earn 2x as much, with the halving algorithm remaining intact. In the scenario you seem to be thinking about, only giving miners more and not the existing holders, obviously that is non-sensical, and that would constitute a theft from existing Bitcoiners. (Which by the way is actually one reason why Eth will never function as a trusted store of value).

Think about it like this. Imagine we dealt with gold in 1kg blocks. And then someone decided to deal in 1 gram blocks instead. The market cap of gold remains the same. You have more units, and each unit would be 1000th of a block. But whether a 1kg Unit, or 1000 grams, it is still the same value.

Now, obviously, (in what I think you are referring to), say gold has a market cap of 20 Trillion, and there was suddenly a massive additional gold harvest (perhaps an asteroid, or a massive deposit found underground), which doubled the total supply - in such a case that additional supply would not attribute directly, pari pasu to each existing holder of gold - and so in such a case, obviously (all other things being equal), the value of the existing gold already mined would fall 50%.

In any case, unlike Eth and other "fake BTC alts", we don't need to worry. 21m coins cap is sacred, incentives are aligned on this, and this will not be changed. Somewhat more likely is that we will see "micro-Sats" being used at some time in the future. This could well happen on a layer 2. Currently there are about 350,000 Sats available for every person on earth, on average. So, it will take some time before there is this need for further units beyond a single Sat. But if as we move to global adoption, and BTC being used beyond store value into medium of exchange, we may see demand for microsats increase (and indeed also with the rise of AI and the need to transact with baselayer economic value units over the internet in increasingly smaller amounts).

"Every cycle, there is a new fool. And every cycle, lessons will be learned..."

The only people receiving newly issued BTC right now are miners — that’s how Bitcoin already works. Removing the 21M cap wouldn’t suddenly distribute coins to everyone equally, it would just keep that issuance going indefinitely. That means continued dilution for holders unless demand rises enough to offset it.

The last part of your post is pure hopium unless miner incentives hold up. If fees don’t cover security once the subsidy ends, hash power drops and Bitcoin becomes vulnerable — at that point, extending issuance might not be optional. The 21M cap isn’t guaranteed if network security is at risk.