Re: the point about what the market will prefer, it seems the relevant question is not just one of absolute magnitude. At the end of the day, a total supply difference of <5% is basically irrelevant if both are thought to have credibly fixed supply, but a fork with a demonstrated history of changing bitcoin’s key economic schelling point (even if it’s “just once, we swear”) arguably weakens the forward credibility of that fixity. You know more than I do about how justified that view would be wrt bitcoin’s mechanics, but IMO “the market” values the unchanging supply schedule more than the absolute number, particularly when the difference would be so small.
Much less important, but kind of related: “there will only ever be 21 million bitcoin” is a much cleaner economic coordination point than “there will only ever be 19.87 million [or whatever fractional number] bitcoin”
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This precedent setting argument ignores the fact that nobody is forcing you onto this fork, nor any future fork. You can choose to fork this time and not the next. Or to not fork this time and to fork the next. Either way, you will own whatever you had previously, but on both chains. You can sell coins on the new chain if you want and buy more on the old chain. Ultimately the free market will decide.
It’s *way* more than 5%! A CRQC operated by a private entity will almost certainly not be interested in stealing 5% of the supply and sitting on it, they’ll likely want to sell a decent chunk of their stolen coins to pay back investors for the immense R&D cost they spent. The total quantity of coins available on markets is not anywhere close to 20M, it’s a tiny fraction. Having something even like 1-2% of total Bitcoin supply flood the market at once is going to have a very large impact on price.
As for your claim that this is somehow changing a fundamental property of Bitcoin, i think you’re losing the Bitcoin philosophy for the way it happened to be written down. Yes, it’s critical for Bitcoin to have a hard line in the sand against coin theft. But you don’t get to pick here - the coins are going to be stolen or frozen no matter what you do. Getting myopic about *who* is doing it isn’t a part of Bitcoin’s value proposition, you’re just reading too much into the way the rules happened to be written down, not the reason for them.
