Bitcoin Forum

let´s suppose that BTC gets so popular all over the world that you can even buy everything in all over the world with BTC, the question is since BTC is a currency limited (21 million by year 2140) the BTC will have to split into .000000000001 for instance? or how is it going to work? if all the people all over the world will use BTC?

Regards

how did you manage to leave the newbie section without reading an FAQ on bitcoins I wonder? Go here and read all: http://bitcoin.org/en/faq

to answer your immediate question - yes, bitcoins, being code, are infinitely dividable (up to 0.00000001, called 1 satoshi, and can be easily extended if needed). but really, read faq before asking any other questions.

I remember the creator mention that it can go lower then 1 statoshi...

Yes, the protocol can be extended beyond the eight zeroes if needed..

Thats what alt-coins are for :)

Satoshi chose his numbers very carefully.  A reasonable "extreme upper limit" to BTC valuation could be to say that BTC has a market cap equal to the combined M2 money supply of the USD and Euro.  To make the math easy, lets call this 21 trillion USD.  That means each coin is worth about a million dollars.  Since each bitcoin is divisible by 100 million, 1 Satoshi is still only worth a penny.  So even if bitcoin is *successful beyond our wildest dreams*, the resolution is still fine enough to facilitate the vast majority of financial transactions. 

The chance that those units of bitcoin will be used in our lifetime is slim.

It can split as much as you want. It can even go as small as 0.0000000000000000000000000000000000000001.

As long as everyone on the network switches to an agreed upon arbitrary data structure to work with such long numbers. If less than everyone agrees to mosey on over to the new abstraction structure, it would be complicated.

What do you mean? I though the creator can split whenever he wants so he don't really need everyone's permission right?

It can be easily extended so there is no problem there.

It's an open source program, so everyone on the network would need to agree at the same time.

People (especially developers) are smart enough to make it work for everyone ;)

We can split it as much as we want, but there really isnt a reason to split it anymore yet.

I don't get it either, how people agree or disagree? Is it like a poll or something?