In the Netherlands, it was just in the news the e-gulden was launched. Before we got the Euro (€) we had that currency in our country.
An E-gulden (EFL) is currently 50 EFL = €1,50
But is there for any cryptocurrenty a limit? Or could the creators just create as many as they like?
I know that Bitcoin has a maximum coin limit.
E-Gulden has a limit of 21 Million.
Most, but not all cryptos have a limit, for example DogeCoin recently announced that there would be a minimum reward of 10,000 doge for every block after the previously announced reward schedule was supposed to end.
Nope, they aren't required to have a limit. The Bitcoin wiki explains why a coin cap is useful.
But an important thing here is that they aren't required to have a coin cap. There is no authority dictating what an altcoin can and can't do. Right now you can go out and create a coin with any feature you want, maybe it won't be viable but it is up to you.
On a quick search I found that Liquidcoin has a minimum of 1 coin per block. Meaning that over an infinite time span the amount of Liquidcoins in existence is infinite.
Developers who make altcoins tend to edit the maximum amount of coins that can be mined. Typically when an altcoin is announced on bitcointalk.org, one of the "specs" or selling points for the coin is how many possible coins can be created. If anyone is interested, I can find in the source code for various altcoins where this limit is set (reply to the comment with interest and I'll go look). I can also compile a quick list of altcoin announcements where the max amount of coins are stated.
Its also possible that a limit is originally set, but then the devs/maintainers of the coin will modify the source to change the limit - I believe something like this happened with dogecoin for example. And I believe the term is called a "hardfork" where they modify the coin source and tell everyone to upgrade to the new version which imposes the new changes such as max coin limit.
The idea of having a max limit is that inflation is considered bad by most of bitcoin/altcoin developers and users.
With non digital money, you need to add more coins, because the population will increase and you will need more coins to show the wealth difference between those humans. There is also the fact that governments (or those that influence it) somehow like inflation.
With digital money you don't need this. because you can just add a 0 before a number. If the max coin amount is 100 and you need more coins, you just allow people to trade 0.1 coins, and then alow then to trade 0.01 coins and then 0.001 coins and this goes on and on. This is impossible with real money, to add 0.001 dollar coins you need to put them at the market, with digital currency you just allow people to split their "0.01 dollars" into 10 parts of 0.001 dollars.
There is also the fact that you can just ask for transaction fees, or include demurrage where people lost X dollars (or X% of their money) every Y months. This you will have coins to give to miners even after all the coins were mined.
