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Title: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: Deadpool619 on March 21, 2018, 03:44:24 AM What is the logic behind having so many decimal places for cryptocurrencies like btc and ethereum
How is it decided for a new crypto, does it depend on coin supply Title: Re: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: Deadpool619 on March 21, 2018, 04:14:19 AM Is there any cryptcurrency without the decimal places feature
Title: Re: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: Blue Tyrant on March 21, 2018, 05:41:52 AM What is the logic behind having so many decimal places for cryptocurrencies like btc and ethereum How is it decided for a new crypto, does it depend on coin supply This one's pretty easy to answer, just read this answer by Cryddit I remember this discussion, actually. Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be. Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply. Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world's M1 money supply at that time was. We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure. 21Million, times 10^8 subdivisions, meant that even if the whole word's money supply were replaced by the 21 million bitcoins the smallest unit (we weren't calling them Satoshis yet) would still be worth a bit less than a penny, so no matter what happened -- even if the entire economy of planet earth were measured in Bitcoin -- it would never inconvenience people by being too large a unit for convenience. Source: Why 1BTC should equal 10^8 satoshi ? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=819656.msg9161555#msg9161555) This should more or less answer the first question What is the logic behind having so many decimal places for cryptocurrencies like btc and ethereum How is it decided for a new crypto, does it depend on coin supply Pretty sure there is, off the top of my memory I can't remember one but you can create an ETH based ERC20 token without decimals so there's that Title: Re: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: TheQuin on March 21, 2018, 07:24:15 AM You've already got the answer to the first question.
How is it decided for a new crypto, does it depend on coin supply Any shitcoin developer can decide to use any number of decimal places they want. They probably put less thought into it than the Bitcoin developers did. Is there any cryptcurrency without the decimal places feature Off the top of my head, NEO has a base unit of 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NEO_(cryptocurrency) There may well be others. Another way to look at it is that the Satoshi is the base unit of Bitcoin and calling 100,000,000 Satoshi a Bitcoin is just cosmetic. Title: Re: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: fuadiansyah on March 21, 2018, 07:43:55 AM Is there any cryptcurrency without the decimal places feature NEO is indivisible... Title: Re: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: Xynerise on March 21, 2018, 09:07:35 AM The decimals of a token or coin depends on its usage or supply mostly.
For ERC 20 tokens it's easy to see the reasoning: something like movie tickets can't be divisible and so can't have decimals. Some coins (eg Electroneum) have 2 decimal places to mimic physical coins in fiat currencies, so the supply of such coins is higher to account for the restricted number of decimals. Others eg NEO, Siacoin, IOTA (even though it's traded in Miota) are indivisible. Title: Re: Logic behind BTC 8 decimal places ETH 18 decimal places Post by: Queen Esther on March 22, 2018, 01:00:58 AM Here are the rationale i read on.
Reduces the user experience complexity of adding ERC20 tokens Allows ERC20 transfer transactions to be easily detected and have the correct value shown on wallets (incl hardware wallets) without requiring pre-setup Ensures that in any on-chain exchange, the price as expressed in computer units (ie. wei or equivalent) is the same number as the price as expressed in human units (ie. ether or equivalent), reducing the risk of confusion or bugs |