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Supporters of Ethereum and Bitcoin have been engaging in a lively Twitter exchange since Friday to answer a seemingly simple question: what is the total supply of aether?
It is not entirely clear where the question came from. But providing an agreed value for Ethereum’s native currency, ether (ETH), proved controversial enough to warrant a new code.
“Adding adequate total supply command to the customer seems like a low-cost and reasonable thing to do,” Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin said on Ethereum R&D’s Discord channel on Friday.
Several independent developers jumped at the opportunity to define the “world computer” supply program.
The coin supply brouhaha takes place in the context of Bitcoin’s more easily verifiable coin supply, thanks to the gettxoutsetinfo command, which each Bitcoin node can execute to calculate the current bid. Due to its distinct design features, Ethereum did not have such a command, hence the impetus behind independent developers writing code to calculate its offering.
The total supply of aether is 111,562,994 at the time of publication, according to Messari. (The company extracts the data directly from the blockchain, Messari research director Eric Turner told CoinDesk.)
Ether, bitcoin and verifiability
Asset verifiability is a strong and innovative feature of blockchains. There are only approximate bid counts for other assets such as gold or dollars. The supply of a given cryptocurrency, on the other hand, can be analyzed to the exact unit. This is useful for modeling or checking, among other reasons.
Bitcoin proponents – particularly Kraken developer Pierre Rochard – recently pointed out that Ethereum did not have an easy method of verifying the supply of its native unit.
Bitcoin’s value and perception as “digital gold” emphasizes its supply characteristics – namely scarcity – more than Ethereum, which aims to serve as a development platform for decentralized financial applications.
Read more: Bitcoin and gold: valuation of hard-cap currencies in times of financial crisis
Indeed, many members of the Ethereum community were dismissive of the supply issue. “I don’t give a damn about the supply” She said Wish co-founder and first cryptocurrency investor Jeremy Gardner on Twitter.
Beyond just reading the numbers, however, a further concern expressed after the fact was the difficulty running a full Ethereum node. Users who manage their own nodes can “self-check” not only the number of existing ethers, but also the validity of transactions on the Ethereum network.
Self-verification is a popular social concept, as well as an ethical touchstone, for advocates of Bitcoin. The argument is mainly based on the ease of bootstrapping a Bitcoin node. Running an Ethereum node, on the other hand, is a much more time-consuming and memory-intensive undertaking, which has led to the emergence of a small class of infrastructure service providers.
Read more: Ethereum 2.0 Testnet Medalla is available with 20,000 validators
Ethereum community members are more dismissive of running a full knot based on Buterin’s arguments in the early days of the project. Ethereum 2.0 developers are also looking to self-verify via lightweight clients made possible through Proof-of-Stake (PoS).
Third party script
As attention grew to the discussion of the offer on Twitter, the Ethereum developers began script creation to calculate the offer.
The developers quickly noticed that many data sites published incorrect figures due to incorrect coin issuance models.
In Ethereum, many third-party scripts fail to calculate some complexities such as uncle or nephew blocks and burner addresses, he said in a tweet.
Bitcoin developers have often made similar mistakes, Casa CTO Jameson Lopp tweeted. Lopp said many scripts don’t take block rewards, called coinbases, left unclaimed by miners into account.
Regardless, Ethereum has an actual supply figure even though it has been difficult to pinpoint, geth team leader Péter Szilágyi said in a tweet. Otherwise, Ethereum would not work.
“Ethereum has multiple client implementations, so a provisioning bug in one would immediately break consensus,” Szilágyi said.
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