BIP 0042 - A finite monetary supply for Bitcoin (soft fork)

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Data sheet for A finite monetary supply for Bitcoin

Title	A finite monetary supply for Bitcoin
Layer	Consensus (soft fork)
Author	Pieter Wuille
Comments-Summary	Summary: Unanimously Recommended for implementation
Comments-URI	BIP-0042
Status	Final
Type	Standards Track
Created	2014-04-01
Post History
Description	https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0042.mediawiki
License	PD

Note: The following is an excerpt from the official Bitcoin site. It is provided here as a convenience and is not authoritative. Refer to the original document(s) as the authoritative reference.

Abstract

Although it is widely believed that Satoshi was an inflation-hating goldbug he never said this, and in fact programmed Bitcoin's money supply to grow indefinitely, forever. He modeled the monetary supply as 4 gold mines being discovered per mibillenium (1024 years), with equal intervals between them, each one being depleted over the course of 140 years.This poses obvious problems, however. Prominent among them is the discussion on what to call 1 billion Bitcoin, which symbol color to use for it, and when wallet clients should switch to it by default.

To combat this, this document proposes a controversial change: making Bitcoin's monetary supply finite.

Copyright

This document is placed in the public domain.