Total supply increase

General Education
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The total supply of Zcash could be increase in the future?? How?

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outside of 21M …not happening

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My understanding is that ECC could basically change anything, including issuance, but it would still be up to users whether to choose run the new software with the changed issuance rules. An issuance change would almost certainly result in a chain fork. Someone please correct me if this is wrong.

I think Zooko talks about this hypothetically in this talk Governance Hard Forks Networks Zooko Wilcox Technion Cyber Computer Security - YouTube (Sorry no timestamp right now… I think it’s in the context of forks ?? if memory serves)

I have other thoughts but don’t want to get carried away with hypotheticals.

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That’s what I’m concerned about too.

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Interesting question …

There is an interesting point when it comes to maximum supply most people never think about:

Decimals!

Most people use the number bevor the decimal in a currency and the total amount of that number as the max supply. That’s all about right but it isn’t the full story.

Example ZEC: 1.00000000 ZEC with 8 decimals, means there are 21,000,000 x 1 ZEC = 21M ZEC

Using decimals to calculate the maximum supply:

1 ZEC has 8 decimals, means that 1 ZEC has 100,000,000 MiniZEC’s (just calling them that here).
21M ZEC with 8 decimals means there are 21,000,000,000,000,000 MiniZEC’s.

With 8 decimals this is the amount that will be available as max. supply:
21,000,000,000,000,000 (Mini)ZEC’s in it’s smallest unit.

Example without decimals, let’s say there is a token without any decimal and 21M units to be released:

1XYZ x 21,000,000 = 21,0000 XYZ token in it’s smallest unit.

The examples above are just to show that 21,000,000M aren’t allways 21,000,000M at the end.

Does this really matter? It matters actually. For example at the beginning of BTC someone was able to buy 50 BTC at once while nowadays people buy 0.01 BTC, maybe in 10 years 0,00001 BTC and so on…

If we go further the real max supply could be increased with 2 methods:
1.) changing the contract and simply apply a higher number, for example from 21M to 50M. (direct max supply increase).
2.) adding another decimal(s) for example going from 8 decimals to 10 decimals. (indirect max supply increase)

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Zatoshi

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‘Zits’ :slight_smile: (20 chars)

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The Zcash Foundation is on the record as opposing changes to the Zcash monetary policy (without broad consensus), which would include supply increases:

The Foundation opposes any change to the Zcash Founders’ Reward, even those that may benefit our balance sheet. Without overwhelmingly broad consensus, monetary policy changes cannot be supported

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Zooko posted about this recently, strongly advocating against any monetary changes: Protect the integrity of the monetary base supply schedule

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How?

Technically it is pretty simple. Chain is whatever its nodes agree upon. For the same reason you can’t stop people from creating a fork of your blockchain - you can always run a node with different rules that will fork off and build its own chain.

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