Bitcoin Forum

Update:

After reading your posts I agree with you all.

Adding decimal places to Bitcoin would not inflate it. It would not harm the currency in any way actually. And may in fact help to allow the usability of Bitcoin when the value requires further divisibility (when the price goes way up per coin).

Thanks for sharing-- it's been a fun topic anyway.  And thanks to those whom shared their thoughts on the subject in a humane fashion.

Your vote is saved should a voting happen in a distant future

Seriously, if 1 BTC = 1 million USD, then 1 satoshi is worth 1 cent

Back in the days when I learned about really small units of weight the gram suddenly gained to many more decimals. Yet I could still hold my pen, it didn't get any heavier because there suddenly were more decimals.
When I learned that even in atoms there are smaller things which they are made of, that didn't increase the Number of Atoms of the Number of Particles, of energy inside the universe. It has always been there.
In mathematics, there is an infinite number of decimals consisting of zeros, you just don't use them if you don't need them. And the same goes for bitcoin as well as for any other currency. Some people say the USD has 2 decimals (smallest coin denomination and your bank accounts smallest denomination) while others say it has 3 decimals (oil trading). If there was a difference between those to and if it was a difference of a factor of 10, then one of these 2 kinds of people would have been proven wrong already.

So its not like adding anything, it has always been there, just not available to you. I hope that explains it :)

Yeah, it will be a LONG time before that topic ever becomes necessary (over a hundred years).

$1,000,000 USD for one Bitcoin would be amazing but actually not unrealistic. That would mean that the market cap would be  $21,000,000,000,000 (21 trillion) USD.    (21 million coins * $1,000,000 each)

There is more USD than that in circulation at the moment.

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

They would still have the same amount of bitcoins, only the value increased, like it does now. read my above and you might understand :)

0.01 = 0.010

Adding another decimal does nothing to the value of the number.
One could argue though that the value is more precise (0.01 is the rounded value of 0.0095 to 0.014 and 0.010 is the rounded value of 0.00995 to 0.0104).

Currently most Bitcoin software is limited to 8 decimal positions.
Increasing this to for example 12 positions is a software issue and will not cause any change of value.

It will open the doors to even smaller payments, but we already have enough Bitcoin dust.
(The official software already handles dust).

No adding more decimal places is not like printing more money.

If I have 10/21 million bitcoins, what's the difference in having 100/210 million bitcoins?  None, I have the same proportion of bitcoins as before!

It would probably change things psychologically but from a numbers standpoint it does nothing.

No.

Agreed ^. Changing the position of the decimal point, yes, this could have that effect, but not just adding more zeros. There is some psychology here though about the perception of currency. Most people in US/Euro/UK expect a single unit of any currency to be not worth so much, and bitcoin will contradict this more and more. Anyone got a link for the planned / suggested names of intervening units for bitcoin, between satoshi and bitcoin units?

this is completely wrong and voids your entire argument. i suggest you to go back to basic school and learn about the meaning of decimals.
e.g. https://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/decimals/decimal_place_value/v/decimal-place-value

i would love to cut an apple on 2 half's and end up having 2 whole apples


0.1 =/= 1

If Bernanke took a truckload of pennies, chopped them into 1/4 cents, kept the face value (0.25 cents each) and started paying all U.S. expenses with them instead of with dollar bills, checks or wire transfers, would anyone be any richer? Would that be "printing money?"

You are failing economics hard.

Every bitcoin would be affected. There would be no increase in value. If we added a single decimal everything that cost 1 BTC would then cost 10BTC, 2 decimals 100BTC. Math mother f'er do you speak it?

you got it wrong too, if you add more decimals, 1 Bitcoin is still equal to 1 Bitcoin, you simply create a new name for  1/1000 BTC which equals to 1 [new unit name here] and which assumes 1000 of 1/1000BTCs and life goes on..  you do same with 1/10,000 or however else it needs to be split up further in the future, but 1 bitcoin always will equal 1 bitcoin.

So if I'm understanding correctly, twenty nickels is more money than a dollar, and a hundred pennies is even more money than that! I suppose that would be true if "more" referred to the mass of the currency (100 pennies weighs more than 20 nickels which weighs more than 1 dollar bill and even then it shouldn't matter as "bitcoin" is effectively massless), but if "more" refers to the value of the money, then the assertion in the OP is categorically false.

point is, this doesn't create more money, it's simply a convenience to escape using long decimals as value of bitcoin increases, we will be using smaller bitcoin fractions.

If I'm breaking a gold bar in two. Do I have more gold? or Does my gold worth more??

No.

Adding more zeros does not change anything to the value nor the supply at all. It just allows more smaller piece so everyone can have some if a satoshi comes to worth a lot. That's all

I would accept that I am failing semantics ;-)

The value is what is important to me. No one would become richer through changing the decimal point unless that change somehow added value.

The reason why printing money is bad is NOT because you "create it out of thin air" and NOT because it increases the money supply. The reason why printing money is bad is because the value of the new money is stolen from the old money: The old money is "diluted". It effectively is a redistribution of wealth (or tax on savings).

This is NOT the same as adding more decimal places, because adding more decimal places affects everyone equally! No value is being stolen from anyone, it only displays differently.

(If you still don't understand: The reason why money printing is bad is because it is NOT distributed equally, as opposed to moving the decimal point)

Lol very pragmatic.
BTW
This is common knowledge in the Christianity, they just prefer to use fish and bread to illustrate the principal.

TL;DR: OP is wrong because he doesn't understand decimal places. Move along.

*. Adding more decimal places does not equal to creating more money out of thin air, it still takes same amount of electricity and mining hardware/software to mine each coin, just the smallest unit will have lower cost (and lower value too). "Money out of thin air" only applies to fiat money today, since they have nearly zero cost

*. There is no such thing as "printing more money and handing out "stimulus checks" to every citizen", where is this impression coming from?? All the printed fiat money belongs to FED, they never handing out a dime to any citizen, it is the government who borrows money from FED and hands out checks to every citizen, and government accumulated huge debt because of this

*. If decimal places are not enough, people will just use some off-chain transaction services for small amount of transactions, and those off-chain services will have the same effect as adding more decimal places

I understand OP's point of view, adding smallest unit of count gives a feeling that the total amount of the smallest money unit is increased, but as others pointed out, OP mixed base unit with a fraction of base unit. Anyway, OP's thread is very interesting

If you are designing a currency system to cope with an expanding economy, you have two choices: Either fix the value of base unit and add more and more base unit (today's fiat money system); or fix the total amount of base unit, and add more and more value for each base unit

If people are used to a floated currency value, either way will work, but the beneficiaries of these two systems are different: In the first system it is the new money creator and those who get money from money creator, in the second system it is anyone who save money

While I don't think the value would change solely because of the decimal places I think that it would allow more people to get into bitcoins, which might in turn lead to greater value.

+1

i vote to replace base 10 with 64.

By "more" bitcoin units I was not referring to more value, I was referring to more quantity of units available.

But I can now see what you guys are saying-- Proportionately, you would always have the same quantity in comparison to others, even if additional Bitcoin decimal places were added. You'd just be that much better off and would be allowing others to get into the bitcoin game as well.

As a side note in a social study of this thread, it's interesting (and sad) how bitter/savage some people were when "educating" or "correcting". For those who debated in a calm manner, I applaud you. For those that resorted to attacking or insulting, well... that's on you.



Very well said and diplomatic of you. I also think it's interesting to think about and talk about all aspects of Bitcoin.

People read this kind of drivel and post threads like "Isn't the Bitcoin Community really Smart?"  LOL @ them.

+1

I seriously doubt there will ever be a time, no matter how far in the future, when anyone will ever claim that they could not participate in the Bitcoin economy because obtaining satoshis was prohibitively expensive.

I lost a few brain cells just reading OP's title.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innumeracy_%28book%29)

don't be sad. some others got it also wrong. you are not alone.

e.g. "der_troll" said, that it affects everyone equally. well, that's technically true, but adding more decimal places does NOT affect any existing coins at all. that's the whole point everyone tries to make.

… and finally ,that's the internetz. you need a thick skin here!

If you were looking for education, maybe ask a question instead of make a bold (and dumb) proclamation as a thread title.

Lol I was just kidding man, stop by the free hugs thread I'll give you one to calm your nerves.

actually I found that image hilarious, CasinoBit : )

wtf? this post is making me dizzy