Bitcoin Forum

One bitcoin is the equivalent of 10^8 satoshi. I wonder if someone could explain why one has not defined the factor as a power of 2,
as this would be a naturale choice from my point of view. Is there any deeper meaning in the preference for the decimal system ?
I'll highly appreciate your explanations and/or suggestions.

it is easy to explain, you are making your mind being exhausted by potencies and whatever the mathematical facts that you are trying to use to understand why bitcoin and almost all the other currencies are using decimals.

But you need to understand that it is not because Pitagoras or Einstein decided to create those decimals are the reason of why bitcoin has 10^8.

It is only because of terms of money, it works by the same way as the cents.

Tell me, if we all had to pay using bitcoins without decimals, we could only afford things who are over $15000 at the moment.

just use that logic.

The point of having 8 decimals, as far as I know, is so that when 1 Bitcoin is worth $1,000,000 then 1 Satoshi would be equal to 1 penny. The idea is people will transact in "bits" (1 Bit = 100 Satoshis) which will be the equivalent of USD today only in Bitcoin obviously.

Because satoshi might have thought at one day bitcoin will be valued more than 100,000,000 $ which will make 1 satoshi = 1$  

If price will be even more than that those decimal number can be increased with fork.

The number of satoshis in a bitcoin is arbitrary. People are accustomed to the decimal system and defining, for example, one bitcoin as 2³² satoshis has no benefit over defining it as 10⁸ satoshis.

From your point of view, why would a binary system be better?

You're right, the  familiarity of people with the decimal system is a non neglible benefit for adoption, and I see that the used constants are choosen in a way,  that the resulting numbers are nice looking in a decimal system.

On the other side, there are at least two points to mention, that are not beneficial.

First, most people will view as the basic unit of account one bitcoin, and one satoshi as some fraction of it. Using 8 decimal places will be much more most people have to deal with in their everyday life, and so - as they will use floating point arithmetics - they will come to the conclusion, that a bitcoin is infinitely divisible. As the minimum transferable ammount is one satoshi, this is not the case. Additionally it is therefore (luckily) not possible to increase the numbers of decimal places in a simple way,  but this could lead to confusion in different ways. One user is disappointed realizing that he is not able to split his satoshi infinitely, the other one is thinking that bitcoin's value is overestimated, out of the same fallacy.

Second, more technically, other aspects like mining rewards and halving times have to be taken into account. By starting with a block reward not beeing a power of two, the next reward is not allways the half of the current one. Wich could lead to rumors that the algorithm does not work in the correct way because it is producing rounding errors and has to be adapted. By definig the first reward with 50 BTC and the time between halving with 210000 blocks the maximum currency supply is essentially given by mixing binary operations with decimal numbers, implicitly choosing the time between halvings in a way to get nice looking numbers, not economic senseful ones. By sticking strictly all parameters to powers of two a much more consistent description could be achieved and the available number space could be much broader exhausted.