There's an interesting thing that's been happening with BitCoin here lately, and for all intensive purposes, there are approximately 2 Quadrillion of them that will eventually be on the market. The mining cap is set at 21 million "coins" but with the crypto space effectively cutting them into pieces, how may are there now? See, if you start breaking them down into smaller and smaller fractions, .0001 or .0000001 of a BitCoin, how is this any different that increasing the amount of coins that are available.
Sure the amount of each fraction is less than a whole BitCoin, but isn't that what effectively happens when the supply of any currency is increased? The BitCoin market cap sounds good, and the price based on another currency looks good, but is this really that different than any other currency in the respect of supply vs. devaluation?
Everyone assumes that the total number of BitCoin is set at the cap of 21 million. This is only because people are only counting the digits to the left of the decimal. If we look at the total "units" of BitCoin that are already "mined" there are roughly 1.67 quadrillion right now. If the "miners" increase the decimal place to 16 digits to the right instead of 8, or more, after all there's nothing stopping them from going as far as they want, what will the total number of "units" be then? I think the limit of 2.1 quadrillion BitCion "units", is not really a tightly limited quantity to me.
This isn't just related to BitCoin, currently there are 1324 different crypto currencies on the market place. All of these currencies aren't caped at 21 million, but just for the sake of making things simple, lets say they all have a cap of 21 million. 21 million times 1324 currencies looks like 27,804,000,000,000, and that's only to left of the decimal.
A common theme in the marketing of the crytpos is the limited quantity. But under the concept of making them more user friendly, and highly divisible, they are tracked as individually owned entities within the block-chain. This micro divisibility isn't decried as something problematic when it comes to the value of the currency. I just don't see how the divisibility and the limited number of the currencies work together. The computerized tracking system only keeps track of the ownership of quadrillions of separate "units".
Interesting point of view!