The argument is again and again that the value of Bitcoin will increase because supply is limited to 21 million. But this is quite simply wrong. Every time Bitcoin is forked that is in real terms an expansion of the Bitcoin currency beyond 21 million. To some degree the same is true of alternative crypto currencies which will flood the market. There is already more than 1000 cryptocurrencues (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cryptocurrencies )
I heard that argument over and over again, but I don't think it is a valid one. When you are forking bitcoin, you are not altering it's supply. You are creating a new coin, that needs to have a set of different rules, and so it cannot be considered bitcoin, so you can't say it's adding more coins to the BTC max supply.
The altcoin that results from that fork, could be accepted or not, and even if they are, they will not be confused with BTC.
Are you saying that bcash, or bgold is bitcoin? Are you saying these coins are an extension of bitcoin? They are not, so you can't say BTC limit supply was changed. You saw what happen after the B2x failed fork. Bcash was being pumped like crazy, and BTC price was decreasing. So basically these coins were "competing" with each other. Given this behaviour how can you say that the bcash fork was an expansion of bitcoin? They are completely different, and no mistakes should be made about that.
i think this is the best answer i saw so far because it explained the simple rules that is referring to argument in this post. Bitcoin supply is limited which in other terms is finite. You cannot say that bitcoin expand its supply by forking. Maybe ask more bitcoin experts for you to understand well about this topic.
Well patt0 agrees that BCH and BTC compete with each other. He says
(...)You saw what happen after the B2x failed fork. Bcash was being pumped like crazy, and BTC price was decreasing. So basically these coins were "competing" with each other. Given this behaviour how can you say that the bcash fork was an expansion of bitcoin? (...)
I say that the fact that they compete with each other for the same USD money (if one price goes up, the other goes down) should make us draw opposite conclusions than patt0 does: namely, the right conclusion as I see it is that the supplies should be added, because they compete for the same USD money!
I'll give you an example.
Example 1. If there are 100 bitcoins and all people in the world are happy to pay in total 100 USD for the bitcoins, the price will stabilize at 1$/BTC.
Example 2. If there were 50 bitcoins and all people in the world were happy to pay in total 100 USD for the bitcoins (total market cap just like in
Example 1), the price would stabilize at 2$/BTC. But if they executed a fork (another 50 BCH, created out of thin air), competing with original BTC, making its price to go down to 1$, then we would have 50BTC at 1$, 50BCH at 1$, and total supply would be 100 cryptocurrency units (they have added up!) just like in the
Example 1.
As you can see, the supplies should be added, because they compete for the same USD money!