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A while back, a friend told me dash had the same supply limit that bitcoin had of 21 mil. I read on wiki recently that it's now 19 mil.
Estimated 19 million coins maximum, with a 7,1% decrease in the number of coins
Did this change? How can it be increased?
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Might want to examine Section 5.2 of a Dash White Paper. Here is the relevant code concerning Dash's monetary policy.
It is difficult to project the exact amount of Dash currency that will come into existence because it appears to be a function of network difficulty, not block number or time. However, hard limits in the code appear to set upper and lower bounds in the graph of the Dash White Paper. Plus funds not fully allocated by the Dash Treasury by masternodes (the Superblocks, associated with 10% of the block awards) are burned which reduces the overall supply.
Also ran across this Dash Detailed video that provides an explanation.
It is worth noting the that the factor of ~7.14% (written as 1/14 in source code) approximately fits the Rule of 72 divided by 10, which means the amount of inflation is cut in half roughly every 10 years.
1The white paper inexplicably has two Section 5's. The mining supply is discussed in the first Section 5. (In case anyone else has trouble finding the relevant section.) – Ken Shirriff – 2016-12-19T21:44:38.290
1The last Section 5 "Conclusion" should have been called Section 6. – skaht – 2016-12-20T02:51:30.870
1No idea. But did you and your friend read this bit "All told 1.9 million coins were mined in 48 hours"? Hint: that's a sure sign of a scam, it's called pre-mine meaning the top of the pyramid started the party early and the suckers are invited later. – Jannes – 2016-08-15T16:29:23.280
1Moreover, the block reward got massively decreased shortly after this grab, and the coin cap was brought down after the fact (maybe even twice, I can't quite recall). All those changes being of course favorable to the dev and to the detriment of later suckers. – user36303 – 2016-08-16T11:07:39.063