Setting aside the (kind of made-up) controversy, I ask the following questions:
- Should there be a standard algo for calculating ETH supply in clients?
- What would be the best approach to deal with the generation and storage of this measure?
- Who are the users of a supply measurement?
- Are there different kinds of supply which would be useful or relevant?
A response by JΞFF to “Crypto’s Weirdest Cognitive Dissonance” on Twitter https://twitter.com/jeffehh/status/1294289745292546049:
It’s not as dry cut as it may seem. BTC for example allow for a simple algorithm to calculate the current amount of coins. For ethereum it’s slightly different because it allows for ether to be burned (as in it doesn’t exists anymore). Without iterating over all of the accounts
in the trie you’ll never have a definitive answer. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but it would take an insane amount of time. The other solution is to create a separate log that records changes to the total supply (I.e. block rewards, suicide calls + pre-minted coins). Bear in
mind that this will only ever be possible when running a full node (I.e. start execution from genesis) and I have no idea what kind of overhead this may cause plus it’s slightly tricky because you’d need to record onlySUICIDE ADDRESS
andSUICIDE <the address of the to be suicided contract>. Also I wouldn’t want to mess with the VM unless absolutely necessary and certainly not, imo, for a nice gimmick.