Bitcoin Forum

Feel free to redirect me if this has been addressed before here; I'm still learning a lot about Bitcoin. From what I understand, it was designed so that there can be only 21 Million Bitcoins issued total. I have no idea if all the Bitcoins have been released, or if they're still being generated and slowly released, or how; I've heard a lot about Mining but I still don't understand if this generates new Bitcoins, lends mass-distributed processing power to manage the whole Bitcoin system in exchange for already-existing Bitcoins, some combination of those two or something else.

The fact of the matter is that because there are only 21 Million Bitcoins, and well over 6 Billion people on earth, then the average person can never own a single Bitcoin. I understand that Bitcoins can be divided up into tiny amounts (thousanths or millionths of a Bitcoin), but with the current price of the Bitcoin at well over $1100 USD and the fixed amount of only 21 Million Bitcoins, it means that a single, whole Bitcoin is out of reach for the vast majority of people.

I think this fact would potentially diminish the appeal and value of the Bitcoin for many people, as no one wants to own ten millionths of something. It's easy for someone to understand $1.25 or $120 or $565,900, but 0.004983 BTC is something else. People tend to struggle with small numbers; it takes a lot of mental energy for the average, not-mathematically-inclined person to count the number of decimal places after the decimal point and figure out "how many thousandths/millionths is this, etc?" Then converting that to dollars is another layer of mathematical effort.

I also have a feeling that people tend to dismiss the value of something when tiny numbers or units are associated with it. I work in a drug testing lab at a major biopharmaceutical manufacturer, and I often have a hard time explaining to my non-scientist friends and family how something as seemingly small and minute as a balance discrepancy of 1 milligram, or conductivity meter discrepancy of 5 microSiemens, or a UV detector being off by 10 nanometers, can lead to catastrophic product failure (and hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars of drug or drug-ingredients going to waste). Medicine and pharmacology are just one of those fields where tiny values are critical; there are drugs where 1.5 mg does nothing, 2.0 mg will cure you and 2.5 mg will kill you.

The technical challenges of entering the world of Bitcoin are daunting enough for the average person, but I think this issue needs to be addressed as well for Bitcoin to have mass appeal; perhaps new, easy-to-understand units or valuation that equal some fraction of a whole Bitcoin (as in 100 _____ = 0.005 BTC, etc). What do you think?

This is starting te be noticed more and more as the price of bitcoin rises and diferent units like milibitcoins (0,001) or unibitcoins (0,000001) are gaining popularity.

Ever heard of a Satoshi?  A Satoshi is (currently) the smallest divisible unit of a bitcoin.  It is 0.00000001 BTC.  Enough for about each of the 7 billion people of earth to own 300,000.  So, yeah, I think they thought of that.

So, 1 BTC = 100,000,000 Satoshis.

I also see this psychological barrier people have. Unfortunately, a lot of people don't actually understand fractional or decimal values, sad but true. When they see it, all they think is that it's a tiny amount and that's about it. However, at the current bitcoin valuation of ~1225 it should not be that difficult to understand what 1mBTC is worth. As the value keeps rising, bitcoins will more likely be valued as mBTC uBTC and one day maybe even Satoshi, and bitcoins can be enumerated less than a Satoshi, so the true distributional supply could be infinite and is not limited to 21M. All it takes is proper communication and marketing so that psychological barrier for people is broken.

Coins are still being mined, although the block reward keeps decreasing, miners also get transaction fees, so the more  transactions with fees there are per block, the more bitcoins have mined/changed hands. At some point, the miners will only be mining for tx fess, however, by the time that comes, they could well be earning more mining tx fess than the block rewards today.

1 million dollars is out of reach for the average person.

Best buy these whole Bitcoins while you can.

Correct 1 MILLION dollars is out of reach, but the DOLLAR itself is not.

Here is a handy table for those that need it.


The current price on Mt. Gox is only $1.23 per mBTC, surely just about anyone can afford that ;)

That's why many people suggest that we should start referring to millibitcoins. So 1 mbit = 1 $. Easy to understand and nothing substansial changes.

Where did you get that term?  Most people call it a microbitcoin (using SI units, symbol uBTC).  Never heard of a unibitcoin before

I'm still trying to understand this concept about "Blocks" and "Blockchains."

Are Blocks just digital records of transactions that need to be processed before they get approved and the Bitcoin changes hands? Is Mining lending your computer power to process these Blocks?

Yeah, but it doesn't matter. Why would you have to own a whole dollar if a single cent became worth $10,000? You're hung up on the concept of comparing it directly to fiat and that people need to hold a whole bitcoin. Just think of 1BTC being equal to 1 million etc.

This is what I tell people. We have our whole lives worked with whole number or something very close to that. It is abstract for most people when you tell them 0.0001 or 0.0000001. Yes people say Satoshi, but then if it doesn't change to that soon it will be a problem, because you can't all of sudden say hey it a Satoshi now, a lot of people would be confused, I bet some would even say no I don't want a Satoshi I want a Bitcoin. That is why I think they should have made more, just to make it easier psychologically for people. After all it's price is only based on psychology of people.

BTW you can see how many BTC out of the 21 million have been mined so far (12,076,925) and a lot of other information about Bitcion here:

http://bitcoincharts.com/bitcoin/

Pretty much, give or take a lot of technical detail.

This is a good place to start learning about the blockchain concept and Bitcoin in general: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/

Nobody will ever buy gold, because 1 ton of gold is out of reach for 99% of the people on the planet.  BTW at last spot 1 ton of gold is worth $36,000,000 or 35,000 BTC.  

+1

mining creates some (currently 25) freshly generated bitcoins every 10 minutes until a certain limit is reached. Than the amount of bitcoins as a reward goes down.

on top of those fresh bitcoins, they'll also recieve all of the transaction fees of the transactions that were made in those 10 minutes and were processed by the miner.

Hey, I cannot afford to buy even 1 kg of gold, and kg is basic SI unit of weight. In fact I have 0.01 kg of gold, some call it 10 gram of gold ;) 

unibitcoins are microbitcoins (µBTC) (AltGr+M) the µ is the greek letter mu, and it's used because 'm' is already used for milli.


Correction 1 WHOLE BTC is out of reach, but the satoshi itself is not. (unless you mean satoshi nakamoto, he's to the moon)


wait, mt. gox switched to mBTC?

FIFY

Nice, thank you for corrections  ;)

Until I can pay for food, gas and rent in Bitcoin (or milliBitcoin/mBTC as others here have suggested) then it will ALWAYS be translated into USD in my head; I'm sorry but that's the reality for me and that's going to be the reality for most people until it becomes a widely accepted alternative currency.

I see. Why is mining becoming more difficult and less profitable?

Why are huge, commercial-like facilities needed for mining when it used to be possible to do it on a laptop?

By design the Bitcoin protocol adjusts how difficult it is to find the next block so that one block is found about every ten minutes.

This means that if only a few people/machines are looking for the next block, like in the old days, then the difficulty is very low.

But when more and more people/machines are trying to find the next block then the protocol raises the difficulty so that even with all these machines trying to find the next block it still takes about 10 minutes to find it.

Right now, worldwide, there are about 6,278,525,000,000,000 attempts to find the next block per second.

Hence it has to be very, very difficult to do in order to assure that it takes on average 10 minutes to find it.

BTW you can see some very intereresting graphs showing all about the current difficulty setting, the next difficulty setting and difficulty history here:

http://bitcoinwisdom.com/bitcoin/difficulty