Bitcoin Forum

If a Bitcoin could be divided a trillion trillion times, would this make a satoshi more useful and stop dust and future proof bitcoin for hundreds of years?

Yes/No?

not with an increase in the bitcoin market cap.

This is like "why don't we just print more money?"

No this is the equivalent of printing money, I was actually pondering about whether Bitcoins being divisible by the amount it is now is a problem but I think as long as it all stays fixed it should be okay, it's when you decide to let it happen infinitely people will be able to just divide up coins constantly and it would have the same affect as printing.

Trust me, any currency that decides to have infinite amounts and be constantly changing will fall under it's own weight in enough time, just like with paper money.

That's not the equivalent of printing money; that's the equivalent of cutting a penny into trillions of pieces.

Satoshis are currently useless because Bitcoin doesn't (yet) have infinite value. :P The fact that they can't be further divided within the Bitcoin system isn't really relevant.

No matter how much you make the precision there will inevitably be some value which is basically useless unless you make the precision too low and it starts getting in the way of transaction.

There are technical ways this all could be improved— make the creator of an output pay the full fee for redeeming it, so no transaction can cost more to redeem than its worth... but they're not related to precision and may be too drastic to ever adopt anything like them in Bitcoin.

My point is if everyone started trading with those pieces because acquiring them would be easier then the currency would be worthless because people would be only trading with tiny pieces of 1 Bitcoin, it's the same as printing except instead of creating it out of thin air everyones dividing it up amongst themselves until it will be nothing this is what would happen if deflation happened the opposite way and we ignored mathematics yet again.

Of course, one thing everyone else will be doing is looking at the numpties wondering what the fuck they're doing when they already have a bunch of whole Bitcoins to trade with in the first place.

Not sure if its like printing money. If a satoshi could be divided into a trillion parts, then we might see economic activity at that level. This would eventually increase the value of an entire Bitcoin.

At the moment Bitcoin cannot scale that I could pay for a cup of coffee with 1 satoshi. But if the network allowed me to use satoshi's and even smaller amounts in day to day trade then its future proof.

Eventually the lost coins will mean less and less whole Bitcoin's exist and eventually we will get closer and closer to trading with the smaller units towards the satoshi. If we created a fix now then the bitcoin network could continue providing trade and transactions for thousands of years.

Of course if you held onto a single Bitcoin it would become very valuable indeed.

By nature the Bitcoin network leans towards these smaller values because lost coins add a nature deflation aspect. Limiting trade at the smaller fractions of a Bitcoin limit the future potential of the network.

Its not infinite amounts, the Bitcoin retains its value we are just allowing it to be split into smaller parts. This is like splitting gold into smaller bits.

Gold is not limited. I can split gold into a trillion trillion parts. Imagine if gold has a set limit that meant it could not be divided past a certain amount, and that limit was a cent, sounds small but if gold become more and more valuable then this limit would start to put people off.

Now you're making me even more unsure of this plan the OP has, I'm happy as long as the amount of times a Bitcoin can be divided stays fixed though just like with the amount of whole Bitcoins there are. It'd be a bit like taking a cookie and giving every child in the world a crumb, eventually it's just going to be nothing.

Yeah, I don't want any more Bitcoins, just to increase the 100,000,000 limit to something massive that means even when all the Bitcoins have been lost we can still do trade with smaller fractions thousands of years into the future. Setting a hard limit that we can never move less than a cent USD through the network seems a bit odd, do we remove this 1 cent limit when that fraction of a bitcoin is worth 10 USD? Then we become worse than the banks. As the value of a Bitcoin rises this hard limit set by Gavin will forever make small transactions impossible.

Maybe Its a good idea we have Gavin's limit. I'm probably wrong, i'm just thinking far into the future.

yeah, more divisibility is not the same as creating more coins, or creating more money.

it will however allow for increased liquidity and a more accurate value reflected in the price

i dont think it will help at all with the dust or spam problem, that is, if there is a problem at all

Of course it's not the same as printing money. https://i.imgur.com/aw4Elji.gif

The whole problem with printing money is that it doesn't get evenly distributed over all current money owners.

Suppose I own € 100. The ECB prints a few billion euros. Afterwards I still own € 100 which is now effectively worth less, because other people now suddenly have new/more euros. Sucks.

I also own 100 BTC (aka 10¹⁰ satoshis). If we increase the divisibility by 9 digits, I will then still own 100 BTC (aka 10¹⁹ nanosatoshi) which is effectively worth just as much. Except there are now more units available. Wicked!

Cheers, this was my point. However according to some increasing the digits will not solve the current transaction limit issue.

However I still think there should more digits for future proofing, and hard transaction limits should take this into consideration.

Exactly what transaction limit issue are you referring to? (I know there are several supposedly, although there's no consensus whether they actually are an issue at all)

Yes, if it was up to me, I'd say increase the hardcoded divisibility from 8 to a 100 decimals right away, and be done with it until the end of times. Just to permantently shut up the "a limit of x units is not enough" winers.

yep.


any way to allow the divisibility to be infinite? or expand as a function of median transaction size?

NO, it doesn't help with the current problem that is
people complainin of blockchain size getting huge and
people spamming the blockchain with satoshi-transactions

When the reward for miners is 1 bitcoin in 2040, THEN, it will make sense to increase the divisibility of btc.
For now on, what has to be done is make very small transactions to empty wallets very expensive or not aceptable.

In 2040 then, when everyone in the world has a btc addres with some btc, and the pool operators will be either very wealthy individuals or central banks miners THEN, it will make sense, since buy a few raid 5 ssd 1tb will be cheap then.

I'm not sure creating the ability for more dust will somehow stop dust, but it would certain future proof bitcoin some more.  Unfortunately, this probably will occur over & over as computers can only handle numbers so large at any given time and the need for bitcoin continues to increase. 

Regardless, I don't believe handling dust is that big of a deal.  It has been 4 years and the block chain is less than 15GB.  I'm sure well find ways to compress it better, and even if we don't, you can purchase 2TB hard drives for $100. 

Not to mention, transaction fees were specifically created to help miners cover costs to keep the network alive.  When/if dust starts becoming a problem, transaction fees will increase for that dust making it prohibitively expensive - kinda like it does now except the block reward acts as a transaction fee subsidy so miners are allowing all kinds of dust for free/cheap because the amount they are receiving for maintaining the network is well above the electricity/storage necessary to process transactions.

Haha, I would certainly shut up!!!


This is interesting, I'm not sure if you could program infinite into the code....