Bitcoin Forum

If we get to the point of there only being 1 Million BitCoins available, how many "units" of currency can that break down to with all the decimal places? Can it provide enough liquidity? Sorry if it's a silly question.

Another big question:

A. How would people be WILLING to accept a currency that, by visual glance, LOOKS ridiculous if we get to the point that a Pizza costs .0000000001 BTC? Or a Car that costs .0000001 BTC? (obviously just examples only). Will people be willing to learn that stuff? I know we'll have things like mBTC and uBTC etc etc, but do you think the learning curve will be too steep for people, especially since we can go many many decimal places down the line? It's not "easy" in the sense of we just have cents with the dollar, and then we have commas to easily distinguish when we've gotten into thousands, millions, etc. I know it might seem like a silly question, but I think it's a serious one too. Is it "too much" for people to handle? Heck, I think Bitcoin is really cool, and I even kinda find it annoying that a pizza might cost .0000000001 BTC someday.

Bitcoin will survive off the living, not the dead. That's how all public company stocks work.

As for your numbers, do some research. It's 21,000,000 coins and we can't easily move past the limit of 8 decimals without severely screwing up everything.

Can one of the dev's comment on this? I heard a ways back that increasing the number of decimals was trivial.

That's where I was getting at Matthew. I have been doing my research. Part of that research is posting on the NEWBIES forum, where it's full of Newbies who ask the basics. I'm not on the General board asking basic things with people who have thousands of posts.

I agree something needs to be done about this. True, you could always move the decimal point, but that doesn't really seem like a sound solution to me.

The software uses a 64 bit integer for each value. You can't make that bigger; you can't add any decimals to that. Although the protocol itself is simple enough to change (hell, you could make it add letters instead of numbers and smiley faces), the program that actually does the calculation won't work without a major rewrite.

You'd have to update every bitcoind implementation, linux, embedded, modified/customized copies, windows clients, website backend codes using it, etc.

As a friend said, "That would be a much bigger change than anything that has ever happened since Satoshi's original client was released".

Barring chain size and block transaction size limits, it IS a sound solution. Infinite divisibility is one of the key features of bitcoin. Even when all but a fraction of a bitcoin are "lost", the remainder can be split to meet any demand.

I guess, but I still think there should be more places past the decimal. Unfortunately you'd probably have to create a whole new currency because changing the protocol like that would cause a major fork. We already experienced a little fork with the recent block size discrepancies. How hard would it be to create one that has an infinite amount of places past the decimal? I think it would be an interesting experiment.

2^64      = 18,446,744,073,709,551,616

BTC limit = 21,000,000.000 000 00? ???

So can we move the decimal at least 3 more places?

It needs to have a full 9 range to make any sense.

Well, I think people could get used to the units.  Metric units are in use in many many places.  Look at distance measurement.  People generally are OK hearing centimeters, millimeters, micrometers and nanometers.  Bitdimes, centibits, millibits, and microbits should get us pretty far.  After that, we start using satoshis.

I think I am more interested in some guy with like 13000 coins in a wallet suddenly dying without anyone knowing he has that much. Some basement dweller gets rammed by the pizza guys truck and all of a sudden there is a million $ worth of coins just lost to the interwebs. Have that happen enough and there goes your bitcoin cap of 21mil coins. Can't make anymore, and if that doesn't get fixed prices will skyrocket once enough have been taken out of circulation.

Does anyone else see a problem here?

hello all, i am new to this bitcoin. i am looking to buy Bitcoins against Moneypak. i can buy Bitcoins worth $10,000 a day. i am not kidding serious sellers reply me for a long term business relationship.  8)

How many years (or decades? or centuries?) will it be before there is a need to "add additional decimals"?  There are several possible solutions.  Not all of them require a re-write or any code changes to the current bitcoin protocol at all.  I'll let those in the future choose which of those solutions will work best for them when that time comes.  It probably won't be in my lifetime.  There's a decent chance it won't happen in the lifetime of anyone currently alive today.  Note that the 1 million bitcoins asked about in original post is 100,000,000,000,000 (100 trillion) units of currency.

I don't see any issue with people quoting prices in nano-bitcoins.  Then you can have your commas and get rid of your leading zeros.  There is no need for it now, but people will transition to it as easily as they understand what I'm saying when I say I bought a car for 24 grand.

You should go here if you want that kind of service:

www.cryptocurrent.com

Let's say that the minimum BTC denomination required for a usable currency should have be equivalent to US$ 0.01 (i.e. a cent).
The smallest current BTC unit is 10^-8.
So there is no problem as long as the value of 10^-8 BTC is no more than 1 cent.
How likely is that?
For that to happen, each current BTC would have a value of US$ 1 million.
Now I am as optimistic as the next man, but I think it will be a little while before we see one million dollar bitcoins ;-)
So I don't think it is a problem.
 

People  author=battmann link=topic=158133.msg1674179#msg1674179 date=1364230392]
I think I am more interested in some guy with like 13000 coins in a wallet suddenly dying without anyone knowing he has that much. Some basement dweller gets rammed by the pizza guys truck and all of a sudden there is a million $ worth of coins just lost to the interwebs. Have that happen enough and there goes your bitcoin cap of 21mil coins. Can't make anymore, and if that doesn't get fixed prices will skyrocket once enough have been taken out of circulation.

Does anyone else see a problem here?
[/quote]

People die having cash buried or hidden weird places that is never found. 

No problem.

I have 1 bitcoin
You have 1 bitcoin
There is an item worth 1 bitcoin in the 2 bitcoin economy.

You die and take your bitcoin with you to bitcoin heaven.

Now it's a 1 bitcoin economy
The item worth half the bitcoin cap now costs 0.5 bitcoins.

If you are dead, you dont give a *** anyways :P

Lol your trolling right?

If someone takes half, even a quarter, of the twenty one million coins that can ever exist then the price of btc will go up exponentially.

Exponentially?  What do you base this statement on?  Are you talking about the price of bitcoin (the exchange rate), or are you talking about the price of products and services that are purchased with bitcoin?  The price of products and services will almost certainly drop.

Stuff is only worth the amount of money units chasing it.

Double the money units, stuff costs double,
half the money units, stuff costs half.

Rarity. The more scarce an object is the more it is worth. Yes, you can divide the btc down into tiny pieces, but that is also cut if half of the coins are caught up in "dead" wallets. Less bitcoins to go around means more expensive bitcoins. This is considering a time when the 21mil cap has been reached and no more can be made.

I mean if I am wrong correct me, I am just putting out an idea that came to me within about 30 seconds of reading this threads title.

This is correct, but I'd think it would be linear, not exponential.  Do you have some evidence or source indicating that it would be "exponential", or is that just something you decided for yourself and decided to tell everyone?

It is from my first statement. First a few people lose their btc in their wallets no big deal, then more and more, once the hoarders get older they will die with more BTC in their wallets than they had in the beginning. Basically it is exponential because the amount of BTC going into circulation is  causing exponential losses in wallet death. Following this the chances of someone loosing a wallet with more BTC becomes higher. Exponentially the price of coinage will go up in time.

That's my 1min argument. I encourage input to the idea, because it might very well be something we will have to deal with at some point.

Don't patronize me dawg its disrespectful.

Edit--

The use of quotes in that manner  on a forum is like using air-quotes in 7th grade

Exponential deflation is not a problem when the factor is relatively small (say, 3% or so). The crude death rate, according to Wikipedia, is 8.37 per 1000 per year, or 0.837%. If dying people have 3.58 times as many Bitcoins in their wallets than living people on average, we would see 3% deflation due to deaths. I don't think that's too unrealistic of a figure.

Then again, I would speculate that most people of advanced age or otherwise anticipating death soon would have a will to pass their Bitcoins to their descendants, which would mitigate this effect. I also think that other economic factors would have a much larger impact on prices than people taking their Bitcoins to their grave, so to speak.

Besides, we already have exponential inflation with USD of about 3% over the last 100 years, and it hasn't been a massive problem.

Bitcoins are different from dollars in this case. If dollars get lost and no dollars can be created anymore, deflation will occur, and you will inevitably be able to pay for your house with a penny, leaving no coins to buy your bread with.
Bitcoins will get lost when people die, but too slowly to initiate great deflation. If the process drives the price up gradually, we will just use smaller fractions of Bitcoin.

I wasn't talking about other economic crisis, I am talking about the future of the virtual currency. Also, you can make as much USD as you want, until we run out of trees that is, but BTC has a definitive cap of 21mil. Nothing more. Ever. Slowly this could cause problems, not in the foreseeable future (BTC is not suppose to reach the cap till sometime in the 2100's) but it is still a possibly problem to be faced.

Stop comparing USD to BTC. In the later stages, if we get there, there will be no comparison. Now THAT I am just speculating upon.

Again, I want to reiterate I have never studied econ except in college while studying computer science so I just didn't care about the subject while there were more interesting things happening that haven't been done before. So I am in no way a good source of information on these subjects. I just saw a potential flaw, even though small now, which could jeopardize BTC in the far future to a bitter end within its very early stages (now). If this is true, and not fixed, that means that BTC will have a very short lifespan. I would rather take the future with BTC than with USD.

Correct, until we can't anymore. Those decimals only go so far; it has a limit as well, and it's 21mil^-8 or something like that. I am not sure.

Certainly no bigger than the pending fork. This will happen sooner or later and it is very unlikely to cause big problems.