's supply cap is one of its biggest selling points. Limiting the network to almost 21 million BTC, the cap makes Bitcoin a ‘deflationary’ currency.
Naturally, people have been questioning whether it might be possible to remove this cap. In theory, by simply submitting a pull request to Bitcoin Core's GitHub, a hosting service that is most often used for code, repository, a developer could potentially have the cap's removal introduced into a future version of Bitcoin.
But according to Bitcoin developers and other industry players, the likelihood of this happening is very low. Yes, it’s technically feasible, but at least now there's an enormous social consensus against such removal. Even if such a pull request goes through, most likely it would end up with another version of “Bitcoin” while the original cryptocurrency would still have its supply cap.
Bitcoin's philosophy
The most recent debate kicked off with a tweet from Angela Walch, a research fellow at the UCL Centre for Blockchain Technologies.
@angela_walch If I present a properly formatted constitutional amendment that removes the right of women to vote, w… https://t.co/WDw93pDJOQ
— Ari Paul ?? (@AriDavidPaul)
As Walch points out, there are only so many reasons why a pull request to update Bitcoin Core's code can be rejected by an editor. These include duplication of effort, disregard for formatting rules, being too unfocused or too broad, being technically unsound, not providing proper motivation or addressing backward compatibility.
However, another cause for rejection is the failure to comply with Bitcoin's philosophy. It's here that Walch's suggestion falls down, since a raised or unlimited supply cap would almost certainly depart from this philosophy, and it would almost certainly confront widespread opposition from Bitcoin developers.
"In order for a pull request to be accepted, it first needs to go through peer review," explains Benedict Chan, the chief technical officer for BitGo.
"A change to the supply cap would represent a significant modification to the behavior of the software properties, and would likely generate substantial discussion and pushback "NACK"s [negative-acknowledgments]. Without clear consensus, no Bitcoin core maintainer would merge it into the code repository."
But even if Bitcoin developers were to insert the removal of the cap into a new Bitcoin Core version, this doesn't necessarily mean that Bitcoin would have its cap removed.
Ceci n'est pas Bitcoin
"Once the new release is distributed, different stakeholders - users, miners, and various organizations that service the industry (exchanges and wallet providers) must all download and run it," says Benedict Chan.
