Bitcoin Forum

This is not a flame or diss at bitcoin, but it is something I can't get out of my mind. I love bitcoin, and would love to see traditional banks loose their grip. But its one teeny flaw, that I am not sure how it would be addressed short of a hard fork.

7 + billion people on the planet, of which most of those handle a currency of some description.

21 million bitcoins. Would mean that if it became widespread no one human could ever have a 'full' coin but it could be spent in smaller denominations.

Discuss. I feel this is an interesting issue I am curious to hear others opinions on.

Quite a blunt topic I know, but I am insanely curious on this one.

Jacob

Why does everyone need a whole Bitcoin?

Well this is what I want to discuss, what are peoples thoughts on it. The fact it can be spent in any denomination is good, but it seems quite bizarre. Unless its just how my mind works. The fact they can be spent in any denomination is a good thing, I am just curious and it is the only flaw I can see when it comes to widespread adoption. Not counting coins slowly 'lost' over time if people lost their private keys, etc and coins already lost to such a thing. Which over time, would bring the supply down even further.

More curious to see other community members thoughts on this aspect of bitcoin. The tight supply would keep them valuable of course, meaning it is worth something but I am more curious that's all on other people's takes on these limitations. Been bugging me for weeks now so needed to put it out there : )

I think there are plenty of units to go around.

2,099,999,997,690,000... an insane number. Sorry if I seemed stupid it was a curious question and I do find that currently I need a minimum spend before one can send coins with the current wallet client... Id bet widespread adoption would change the whole dynamic of transaction fees and the like? Especially if people were not owning whole bitcoins, the transaction fee would become more noticeable and would need to be adjusted? Sorry if I seem dumb on this front its been a curious thing for me its a psychological thing about having 1 complete bitcoin, or is that just the way the wallet reads it out as in 1.xxxxxxxxxx so its kinda deceiving... Everyone only having 0.xxxxxxxxx would seem odd

Now you've explained that to be, so the actual form of the currency is measured in the smallest units, not the 'BTC' measurement which kinda was psychologically deceiving! Should have done the math and checked how many satoshis there could be : )

Jacob

This is a non-issue compared to other potential problems with Bitcoin/bitcoin.

Just like how in other countries where there is inflation (or hyper inflation), they change the prices up when needed,
the same will happen with bitcoin in the future, we will just go in reverse and prices would go down.

Edit: also to add to the above comments, with Bitcoin/bitcoin,
my understanding is we can go even below a satoshi, if that is ever really needed.
So we could always add more zeros to the end and are not limited to the "2,099,999,997,690,000" number.

The standard Bitcoin Core wallet has an option that can set the display units to be a) whole bitcoins, b) milli-bitcoins, or c) micro-bitcoins.  I'm sure other wallets have such an option also.

Not just your mind but it is how every human mind works. I mean because there are total 2.100.000.000.000.000 of Satoshis available, human mind needs something more managable which can be understood better, so 21 million Bitcoins and each Bitcoin containing 100 million smallest units called Satoshi can do this trick.

The OP didn't have a math teacher that explored the concept of 'infinitely divisible".  While not infinite, bitcoin is pretty damn close.  This is a major non-issue.  


It's almost as if your mind doesn't actually work.  Maybe: 'sort-of lays around' is more like it.

Transaction fees have been adjusted several times in the past as the exchange rate has increased. I'm sure they will continue to be adjusted.

The smallest unit of U.S. currency is the "penny".  The smallest unit of Bitcoin currency is the "satoshi".

There are 100,000,000 satoshi in 1 "bitcoin".
There are 100,000,000 pennies in 1 million dollars.

Saying that you have 0.002000 00 BTC is like saying that you have 0.002 million dollars.

You can say that if you like, but it's easier to just move the decimal over 3 places and give it a new name (2 thousand dollars).
You can do the same with bitcoin.  Move the decimal over 3 places and call it 2 millibitcoin.

Or you could move the decimal over 6 places and give it another name:
2000 dollars
2000 microbitcoin

Saying its a "flaw" that there isn't enough bitcoin for everyone to have at least 1 bitcoin is like saying its a "flaw" that there isn't enough dollars for everyone to have at least 1 million dollars.

With Dollar inflation, im pretty sure in next one or two generations everyone will have at least 1 million dollars... Dollar flaw will be fixed...  Sorry, culdnt resist.

ok in most western world countries. the average life time savings is $45k
(yes some are billionaires yes some only have $100 in the bank account. and yes some are children who dont have banks..but averages as $45k so dont knitpick)

now imagine all 7billion people had $45k each so that everyone on the planet would total $315 trillion

$315,000,000,000,000

bitcoin lets say there are 20mill (1m deductions due to private key losses/deletion), there would be 2 quadrillion satoshi's

2,000,000,000,000,000

making $1 convert to ~6 satoshi with the lowest tx fee of 1sat=$0.16c

so that is maths of the utopian dream some fanatics wanting a one world currency.. however, the whole world WILL NOT adopt bitcoin. sorry but that is the reality.
there will be MANY millions.. MANY... but not all 7 billion will use bitcoin for their entire life savings..(sorry to burst your bubble)

so lets say 10% of the world(700m) put life savings into bitcoin, each $1 would be ~60satoshi with a minimal tx fee of <2c(1sat)
so lets say 1% of the world(70m) put life savings into bitcoin, each $1 would be ~600satoshi with a minimal tx fee of <0.2c(1sat)

so even at 700million people putting their life savings into bitcoin, the maths works with a reasonable and workable holding and reasonable tx fee.

so based on units of measure bitcoin is capable of holding funds of upto 1 billion people with a sub 3c tx fee

nope.


this is an insane number : http://www.usdebtclock.org/

But we all know that bitcoin will not be so widespread. If it became widely accepted, our governments would come together and take a shot at their own altcoin - one supported by them - that has the capacity of, say 21 billion, to help.

Try to calculate with mbtc :)

adoption will fix it itself, by evaluating more the minimal divisor of bitcoin, 1 satoshi will have a greater value

and you have a whole 2.1Q(quadrillion, short scale) of satoshi, plenty for everybody

Not everyone needs one Bitcoin. You just need a small amount. And how do you know that everyone wants a whole Bitcoin, you can't make a decision for everyone else.

There are only 170,000 tonnes of gold in the world. Is that a fatal flaw in gold since it is not possible to own 1 tonne per person?

Scarcity exists. It will always exist. Picking any unit and saying "There aren't enough of these for everyone to have one" is arbitrary.

Bitcoin is fungible to eight places and even after that can be patched to support more.

What is the difference between everyone having 1 bitcoin and everyone having .003 bitcoin? Nothing.

It's funny that you have mentioned this, but Bitcoin was designed to mimic the scarcity of the gold!

As for hehe number of bitcoins, people pay too much attention to this so called problem. 1 btc is divisible up to 8 places and this can be even higher with a simple change of code in the future, so no worries!

my brother was the same.  when i first explained bitcoin to him he had to have a whole one.  which was strange to me because i had been buying in what ever 0.0.....'s i could afford. 

The other point is if you check out some other wallets for example Breadwallet on the iphone you use micro bits so instead of 0.00430000.  its shown as 4300mbtc which means it looks like whole numbers.

This is a "problem" with a readily available solution indeed.

There is not a limit of 21 000 000, there is a limit of;

2 100 000 000 000 000. Divided by even 10 billions human, thats 210k sat per capita. So plenty. And if we EVER need more, we can easily add as many 0's as we need.

So right now the limit per capita for 10b humans would be 210 000, if you somehow can't wrap your head around decimals.

It's indeed psychological, that's all. Other than that is a no-argument. People will use BTC for it's features, not because they can call what they are holding Bitcoins or satoshis. Most people use the dollar, even tho they will never see a million dollars on their bank accounts, this is the same, even if most people will never see 1 full BTC, they will still use it, because the features are exactly the same.

If it later feels like its too less.. its no problem at all to split satoshis into 0.1 and 0.01 more..

I wonder what people will call a Satoshi, if the comma needs to be shifted? I am not saying, it will be a immediate need, but we should be debating this, in the event that this needs to be done. Any suggestions ? If Gavin & Mike succeeded in taking control over development, it might have been 1 x Gavi or 1 x Mikey.

Just fooling around, do not get your panties in a bundle. ^hmf^

For practical purposes, i'm guessing mBTC will be used, then uBTC, etc. I dont think Sat or Mikey is going to be used as the principal denominator.

In the Bitcoin Core, satoshi's will always be able to be split into as many little divisions as necessary to fill a need for more bitcoins.

As long as the encryption isn't cracked, division will not be a problem.

:)

Bitcoin will never have exactly 21 million Bitcoins, it would have 20999999.9769BTC in total. That is still more than a century away. By that time, the population would grow even higher. Also, many users lost their private keys in the past and some burnt it voluntarily and hence the actual number would be much much lesser.

Bitcoin itself can be divided into more than satoshi so it isn't a problem at all. The minimum relay fee can be changed easily if the nodes adopt it.

but there approximately 6B(35285 in one ton, x170k) of ounce, which about the same as the numbers of people in the world minus 1B

you need to compare gram to satoshi and you are on the same boat, but with a much lower number for gold

It seems interesting discussions and has explained a lot. I was more curious to the communities view and it seems like there will be more than enough to go around! I went to bed early so only just read all these replies :D

Jacob

Well, if we're talking economy of scale, then the topic starts becoming heated instead of interesting because, while there are plenty of satoshi to go around the world, will the blockchain platform be capable of handling (2.1 *10^6)(1.0 * 10^8), or so, transactions at any given moment?  I mean, the more valuable each satoshi becomes, the more relevant it will become in the ledger and the more likely it will become to see a one satoshi transaction.  Hmmmm!  Just a thought?

Haha I will rather stop using Bitcoin altogether than calling units Gavi or Mikey! :D

I think that these are all potential sweet troubles! If we ever come to have worries like this in a community, that will mean that we have made it big time!

There are 50 billion dollars being pumped into the system each month. Did you know that there are people in this world who don't even own a single dollar. Also there are people who can't afford a dollar because their are in debt.

I don't think you understand - the dollar value or any artificial value is meaningless - all that matters is what can be purchased with it (i.e. real purchasing power). Compare USD and Yen - Yen is roughly a factor of 100 times larger in terms of unitary size, but any meaningful conversion realises that this difference is irrelevant. Given that we can have smaller units than a satoshi if needs be - it matters not what the supply limit is.

i was just arguing that gold is not rare, and the "rare" factor does not matter at all, when you want to talk about adoption and about divisible numbers

bitcoin is not rare also, it's all about divisibility, if you take into account 1 satoshi as the main divisors, there are plenty for eveyrone, bears in mind that i'm not against what he have said, just pointing out a thing

Rarity plays a value in things that are hard to divide as well as the perception of value itself (humans will tend to overvalue things that are 'rarer'). But yes, for all intents and purposes Bitcoin doesn't suffer from this issue due to the ease by which it can be divided. If you were to use an analogy Bitcoin would be like oil (easily dividable) whereas a rare commodity would be like a rare painting - indivisible without losing value.

If all the people want to own some bitcoin, then 21M/7B = 0.003 bitcoin. If the bitcoin is distributed evenly, every body will get 0.003 bitcoin. If you have 3 bitcoin, you are 1000 times richer than average person.

I see no problem. All I see is cute satoshies which worth much more than $

This would require a hard fork. Also if 1 satoshi would be worth something significant we might also consider changing mining schedule to go beyond 2140 - that is make the block reward keep halving into fractional satoshis. This would effect how the last few satoshis are mined, but would have no significant impact on the ~21 million total BTC.

Except that gold is measured in troy ounces. This makes one tonne to have about 32,151 troy ounces. This gives everyone in the world less than ¾ of a troy ounce of gold. This equals almost 1.1 standard avoirdupois ounces of gold per person in the world on average.

:)

Are you sure it would need a fork? I would think that all it would need would be that everyone update his Bitcoin client.

:)

That's the whole point of why it might be very smart to buy one now while a whole BTC is attainable.  The fixed supply is part of what makes it an attractive investment.

The only real problem is that with miner fees.
If we have mass adoption, rise in price, what will happen to the fees and output priority?

I'm not a technical person. However, if the denominations start to go below satoshi, the new client would implement this and if miners mine the blocks with transactions below satoshi, it would create a fork. The newer clients will agree and the older client would disagree. This would create a fork.
The relay fees would probably decrease. The transaction fee the miners want to accept is totally up to them. I would imagine that the transaction priority relaying limit would decrease and the block size would increase in the near future. The blocks can then have more free transactions.

Well currently, money/currency is not evenly distributed at all. If we were to evenly distribute 21m bitcoins to 7b people it would around 0.003 each, but thats never going to happen because no one has the same amount of currency.


But it will be looooongggg before we reach 21m bitcoins.

Changes in the client would be small.

The miners would be the first ones to upgrade their clients, because they are on the cutting edge, so to speak.

People who didn't upgrade simply wouldn't have their wallets updated when they received transactions smaller than their clients could handle... at least until the combined amounts for any single address reached 1 satoshi or more. And they wouldn't be able to send smaller amounts than 1 satoshi.

The latest Bitcoin core clients look for the best chain. They would still do this, even if they couldn't update the blocks with fractions of a satoshi. Why? Because the miners would still be using updated clients that would be indicating the best chain.

I, like you, can see that there might be problems. They should be able to be solved. If in the future, when miners were down to mining only 2 or 3 bitcoins per block, or if the whole block size process is going to be changed like Gavin wants, by then everyone will be using an updated client. Are there people who still use version 0.2.0 (we are a 0.11.2 right now)?

:)

By the time of all the bitcoins are mined, there will be loss of many coins. We shall have around $16 million in 2140.

Maybe they will introduce Bytecoin to cope with 8 times the volume. :)

We won't even be around when that happens.

@ontopic, it's not much of our concern really. The BTC economy would fix itself, and adjust accordingly. It's supply and demand.

When I started with bitcoins I used to think the same but never thought of asking anyone since it would make look stupid.But after searching for a while on google,I'm convinced there is no limit as to the number of bitcoins available right now are sufficient to give everybody few satohsi's.Also not everybody needs 1 btc.

As most has said, it is not an issue
several places already show values in mBtc and as the price goes up, soon enough we will be calculating in satoshis as opposed to full BTCs

Think of commodities, aluminium is priced in tons but gold is priced in grams

Please explain how you can accomplish this with just small changes to the client when you need to redefine the representation of the value field of the TxOut data structure.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction#general_format_.28inside_a_block.29_of_each_input_of_a_transaction_-_Txin

Currently value is a 32-bit field and the smallest bit represents 1 Satoshi. If you add more bits to this field or modify it in any other way (to create a high resolution value with sub-Satoshi precision) you will change entire fabric of the Bitcoin network. If this is done in an uncoordinated way nodes/clients that only recognize the old 32-bit value would reject the new high resolution value.

Even if there were enough bitcoins around to hand everybody 1 bitcoin, that would not be how bitcoins would be distributed. Some people will be accumulating just like with fiat, while others end up holding nothing.

It's human nature that some people find a way to gain a lot of something, while others find a way to get rid of everything. We should accept that this can never be changed.

you are getting the wrong idea dude, make bitcoin popular does not mean that everyone has to own a bitcoin. it means that everyone must know about bitcoin and if some problem occurs to them regarding transactions then they know about a reliable source such as bitcoin. the goal of the developer of bitcoin might not have been to remove bitcoin but to spread bitcoin as gold, gold is also limited but many people who can afford gold have gold in some form and even the elder illiterates know about gold. i might be wrong but this is what I thing bitcoin was invented for.

That is the point. Many people do not own gold, but they know what the gold is. When crisis hit, they can buy gold.

A quick calculation shows that if in 2140 all the btc is mined and the population sticks to the current 7bil then everyone on the planet would need 0.003btc for them to e evenly distributed; of course some people will have none and some will hold many and some will have a few, just enough to be considered wealthy.

I have 0.1btc right now and intend to get more, so I guess that would put me in the 1% in 2140?

Of course then you also have the lower value coins that people will have accrued including Dogecoin that apparently has no limits so there will likely be trillions of those floating around the internet and stuffed on antique quantum computers... :)

Not everyone will be able to have 1 bitcoin. Even these days just 1 bitcoin is a goal for many, and its difficult to achieve with current prices.

^^^^

/thread

You do know that not everyone is going to own 1 whole Bitcoin. You can own parts of Bitcoin as well. Maybe you didn't know that.

This isn't a problem at all. BTC is just like everything else. Some people own 10 houses, but millions are homeless. Jay Leno owns more than 100 cars, while millions don't have any. This is the world we live in. BTC will change how we handle money, but it won't change the world.

Like most people said why the need for a whole bitcoin when fractions of one can be used no different

Some currencies are worth more than others. Just like the 1 Iranian Rial only worth about 0.08 bit, while 1 British Pound worth about 3,400 bits.

In the near future when bitcoins will be widely and globally accepted and adopted by every single people around the world. even 1 satoshi will have its value. cant for the time that 1 satoshi can get me a cone of ice cream, well im hoping i will live long enough to witness it.

If the bitcoin price is $1m, 1 Satoshi is worth about a cent. We need the bitcoin price to be $100 million for a satoshi to buy a cone of ice cream.

Because you cannot do much with less than $400 and people need to do lots of things in their day-to-day activities.

There are also other CC, that would add value

it will all come down to how many people are going to be using bitcoin in the end (7 billion or just a couple million) and also bitcoin price.
and both of these two have a hand in hand relationship. higher price will make more people use it and more people using it will lead to higher prices.
and high price means 1 satoshi is worth something, and as it was pointed out earlier there is 8 decimals after bitcoin.