Is the Ethereum unlimited?
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Answers below are by Marean Vladimir, Isaiah Zimmerman, Morton Gelt and Raj Singh.
Updated Dec 2nd, 2017
The number of Ethers stands currently at 96 million and does not have a hard cap as others have explained. I mined this summer and the mining gradually goes lower, while the price goes up, so it will level.
But the thing with Ethereum is that supports tokens and other things on top of it, so practically tokens like OMG are based on Ethereum. There are many at the moment and more will come. Check out Caviar for example that has it’s presale today and that builds a crypto fund for investing and has its token on Ethereum.
All these add up on top of the Ethereum network. Ethers were designed as a currency to support all these tokens and projects on top of Ethereum.
Answered Nov 28th, 2017
Ether, the currency native to the Ethereum blockchain, does not have a hard cap. However, with the further developments in Ethereums push towards becoming a full Proof of Stake protocol and as more apps and transactions occur on the network, the generation of new Ether, which acts like gas and is burned during transactions and development, is expected to level off and reach equilibrium. Meaning that essentially a soft cap exists when the burn rate matches the generation rate.
This is not a unreasonable hope either as the Ethereum network now processes more transactions per day than all other major blockchain networks combined
Answered Nov 29th, 2017
Ethereum is slightly inflation, it means that the number of ethers does increase each year slightly below the current inflation (can’t say how they do calculate it).
Heard an interview with Vitalik who has stated that when they switch to POS they might limit the number of coins.
Answered Nov 28, 2017
Yes more or less. I think the supply cap is something like 99 trillion ether. That’s pretty much unlimited. I have heard talk about doing something about that in the future and putting a finite cap on it, but I don’t know many details of what that means or how it’s going to be done.
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