Bitcoin Forum

Are 22mil bitcoins enough for a mainstream currency?  I know that they're divisible to eight decimal places, etc., but most people are used to adding numbers to the left of the decimal place, not the right.  I wonder how real this psychological barrier is.   (I realize that the ceiling for new minting can not be changed.)

Should the poll not be the other way round?
1 Bitcoin = 20USD ?
I personally have no issues having few, instead of saying point 00000001 the time will come that there will be an appropriate unit of measure with a nice easy name that will refer to that. and Apps for making payments can make it look very simple as well.

I had the same thought.  If the app interface displayed the value of Bitcoins in USD, it would help its mainstream cause. @Bitdragon Thanks for pointing out the error, corrected

As I've said before, the decimal place is too far to the left and should be moved.

Thats the worst idea i've ever heard.

USD is probably not a good idea though in my humble opinion. Better a unit of measure that relates to the one and only Bitcoin so one does not need to mention all the decimal points. There have been some discussions on other threads about this.
In USD relates to an exchange rate and eventhough the trend is clear it is subject to ups and downs. Some merchants, or at least one, like bitcoingadgets, make their prices in BTC dependent on the MTGOX rate as they probably want to ensure enough USD to pay providers who do not accept BTC yet.

I'm not that technically savy but I don't understand why more decimals cannot be used now as that would encourage usage for very small payments such as ads, verifications of identity or voting maybe?

Or rather, it addresses a different issue.
Stating BTC in equivalent USD does not make it easier to display, today, the smallest unit of BTC-

Moving the decimal point would probably create create too much confusion. If it could still be done I'd vote for 2 places, but it's probably better to just use a new name like Bitcent for BTC 0.01.

It's interesting that the exchange rate is now about parity with USD, which will help in adoption.
I think the inflation scheme was chosen rather arbitrarily and should have taken adoption into account.

@noagendamarket Really? Worst ever?  All I'm saying is that at many sites that offer services already say something to the effect of "For x value of Bitcoins, depending on the MtGox exchange rate."  It would not be the worst thing in the world, when in 5 years assuming the 1:20 Bitcoin to USD exchange rate, you could see the value in USD displayed in an app interface.

Is that technically possible? To change the protocol so that instead of 21 million BTC with 8 decimal points we could have 21 trillion BTC with 2 decimal points for example?

I hope not.

You cannot change the smallest possible unit, so it could only be 21 trillion BTC with 5 decimal places.

Showing USD would immediately alienate the rest of the world .

We could just use SI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_System_of_Units) - mBTC, uBTC and nBTC, where the minimum is 10nBTC.

Trillion = 10^6 * Million, so it would be 8-6=2 decimal places.

+1

We could shift the decimal point 2 steps to the right and use mBTC and µBTC.

Can 'we' really do this, just start yanking about with the numbers like maniac Bernanke's that have lost all sense of decorum?

If 'we' can suddenly decide to just shift the decimal point around, then I will sell what small amount of bitcoins I have and use the money to purchase a bottle of Żubrówka, then to lament long into the night for what might have been.

No need to move the decimal point when using SI prefixes. People would just say 0.01 µBTC instead of 10 nBTC.


What's your reasoning for quitting over this, other than being a drama queen? The amount of units would stay the same at 2.1 quadrillion.

@noagendamarket Thanks for clearing that up. I agree. There's still a need that can be addressed though

Like diluting shares of a stock? multiplying all stock amounts by 10 and dividing it's value by the same amount? It could work, but only later on... I myself prefer the micro btc etc etc

Hmm. Informal names.

Bitcents, and Satoshis.

Yup, nice and simple idea :-)

The Japanese ¥en currently trades at $0.012190 to the dollar and people still use ¥ quite a bit.

In fact, when the ¥en was trading at 130 to the dollar in the good ol' days, it was 1¥ = $0.007692  (traders would just drop the first two zeros and trade it as 7692/7694).

I propose "bitties" over "bitcents".  This way I can say "Fitty bitties to join my committees".

Shifting the decimal point does not create new coins, it only alters the representation of the coins in the client.  Every bitcoin is already divisible to 8 decimal places, shifting the decimal point over two places simply resulting is a trade unit that is accurate to 6 decimal places.  Everyone still has exactly the same measurement of value as they possessed before the shift.  The only effect is that it might be easier for people to understand.

That's the opposite situation. People have to deal in tens or hundreds of thousands of yen, not figures like .00006831


I suspect one of the reasons it's easier to deal with really large numbers than really small numbers is that we use commas (or periods for you Europeans) to make it easier to visually recognize the units.

$1,800,000 is easier to read than .0000018


edit: To further illustrate, it's far easier to tell the difference between $1,800,000 and $18,000,000  than it is to tell the difference between .0000018 and .000018

Not true.  It's only the opposite situation if looking at it from the ¥en-to-Dollar perspective.  When you look at it from Dollar-to-¥en (or future BTC-to-Dollar) perspective, then one Dollar would equal .0070 BTC in future.  Exchange rates are always different sides of the same 'coin'. Just inverted.

"Bitties" is a nice name, though I would rather that 1 bitty = 1 milliBitcoin, and that the whole concept of "bitcent" be put to rest.

Nice!  I totally dig that.

I don't think the awkwardness of the exchange rate to the USD is an issue. The issue is the awkwardness of prices people will be using when buying and selling goods and services.

Ask Zimbabwean people if there are happy with huge numbers on their bills.

Their problem is that the number of zeroes keeps increasing, not that there are many to begin with.

And there's surely a happy medium between having $100,000,000,000,000 notes, and dealing with units of .00000001

Your OTHER left!

Heh, I like that naming idea. Let's name the millibitcoin the Satoshi, and there's no need to move the decimal point. 1 Bitcoin would just be equal to 1000 Satoshis.

I'm so use to Engineering Notation, when I first started and got my .05 BTC from the faucet, I thought, "Woohoo, 50 mBits!"

I like "bitchange," it's got a nice ring to it.  |  If bitchange becomes the world's currency in 100 years, each coin will represent 1/22,500,000 of the world's entire circulation.  Not likely, but still a crazy thought.

What happens in this sort of thing (in science, for example) is that the colloquial reference to the currency will be normalized so that trivial amounts can be expressed as though there were numbers to the left of the decimal.

For instance, .000001 BTC = 1 uBTC (microBTC). And often, the most common-use case can even replace the generic meaning of BTC. Lowercase "btc" could mean uBTC while "BTC" means formal .000001 BTC. Or alternative names are used altogether (as already discussed).

Convenient values usually displace formal values. Another example: "Calorie" vs "calorie" vs "kcal". Nutritional data chops off three orders of magnitude and still arbitrarily calls it a "calorie".

Now we have a golden opportunity to avoid such horrors (say "kcal" if you mean kcal but even if you do, always use kJ and MJ) by doing it right from the start. Calling a megagram a "tonne" is fine but calling it a "gram" is confusing. So is calling a millibitcoin or microbitcoin a "bitcoin".

Who on Earth has been silly enough to suggest that?

A bitcoin is a bitcoin, it's 21 000 times less than the total amount of the quantity that the sofware called bitcoin deals with.

I confess however that we miss a name for the "thing" that bitcoin measures.  "second" is a unit of time, "meter" is a unit of length, Octet is a unit of information data.   So, what "bitcoin" is the unit of?


I guess it's the unit of "Satoshi Nakamoto's crytocurrency".

A "bitcoin" is the unit of Bitcoin (Satoshi Nakamoto's cryptocurrency). Often we can just say "money".

I'll just chime in here and say I too have worried about this issue.  Part of the issue is simply conventional notation, where digits left of the decimal point tend to be separated every 3 digits (whether it's by a comma or period or whatever the local convention is), while for digits right of the decimal point, all you've really got is scientific notation to give you a quick feel for how far out the number extends.  

The answer is it doesn't matter. As long as people have the trust that their BitCoins will retain their value that's all that's important, everything else is just semantics..

People will not get used to having only a few, they will strenuously try to get more inadvertently providing wide and powerful backing for them.

Just use the wonderful metric system and stop worrying about this subject.

I don't think most people will have a probably with mBTC, uBTC, etc.

Sure, but these often emerge as vernaculates and local conveniences rather than from some centrally-dictated term coiner.

After all, if Bitcoin continues to gain traction, you can't say with any certainty what decimal point trivial-use BTC will hover around. It's such a gradual process that terminology develops just as gradually. In the Imperial measurement system for example, orders of magnitude have been historically added and lopped off of various terms of measurement just to follow convenience.

In other words, nothing needs to be dictated today because humans are just fine at developing colloquialisms to suit their needs, unofficially or officially.

Metric sucks, and would fail without explicit government advocacy and support.  Case in point, most Americans grew up learning American Standard (very close to Imperial, but not quite) because all the adults used it, and also learned Metric in school, because the government wanted people to use it.  Most everyone, if they have a choice, prefer American Standard in regards to the kinds of useful metrics lay people use; i.e. miles for traveling distances, feet/yards for sight distances, and inches and fractions of inches for fine distances.  The fact that an adult can convert traveling distances (km) into sight distances (meters) in their head is generally a useless feature, because people rarely have any reason to do so. 

American here, confirming Metric does not suck, and is in fact superior to that of the American Standard.

And I would like to see where you got your information on "Most everyone, if they have a choice, prefer American Standard".

Also, the fact that every other country in the world has adopted the Metric System seems to contradict that statement.

Edit: Ok, most counties have. Myanmar and Liberia appear to be exceptions.

Talk to an elderly Canadian, and you're as likely to hear them talk about feet and miles as United States people do today, though Canada has been metric for some time now. It'll take a couple of generations to make such a massive conversion, I suspect.

Neerus sucks, too.


Look around you.  Unless you are an engineer or some kind of scientist, the majority of people who are around you at this very moment have been educated in both systems, and continue to choose American Standard for daily functions.  They can do so because they are free to do so.  Their local, state and federal governments have to deal in whatever metric that the pubic insists on using.



I hope you realize this is not an argument in favor of the free choice of the Metric Standard, since in most (if not every) cases, the public must deal in Metric because either their governments refuse to deal in any other system, Metric is the only system of measurements taught to children, or more likely both.  I can understand how Metric was better in Europe than the differing standards that were similar to Imperial, but different than the nation-state next door.  But that is not the case in the US, as we have been using the same standard across a land and culture vastly more intertwined than anything Europe could replicate before the European Union, but the Metric Standard was a great leap forward for interoperability and clear communications.  Not because it was a base 10 standard, but simply because it was a cross-border standard.  As far as consistency, American Standard is broken.  But it's never really been about consistency, but utility.  And for Americans, being the only significant population taught two different standards of measurements, the utility remains decidedly on the side of the American Standard.  Brokenness aside, American Standard is mostly a base 2 (or base 4) standard based on fractions, which is easier for lay people (and particularly those who are math illiterate) to understand intuitively.  For example; Gallon (1/1), Half-Gallon (1/2). Quart (1/4), Pint (1/8), Cup (1/16), Gill (half-cup, 1/32).  Beyond either end of the range of that example, things get broken, but this range alone covers most of the useful range (utility) for everyday measurements of liquid volume.  We do the same thing to all other units less explicitly, but we do it.  Half-mile, Quarter-mile, half-inch, quarter-inch, half-pound, ounce (1/16th), dram (1/256th lb), etc.  The greatest advantage Metric had that led to it's adoption in Europe, and most of the former colonies of Europe, was it's cross border interoperability.  Metric did not have an advantage over American Standard in this regard, so it has never gain common usage outside of professional fields.  The fact that Metric doesn't dominate in a large society free to choose it is evidence that it was not superior enough for a free public to choose it over what they already used.

Canadians are forced to use metric when dealing with their governments, much like Europeans.  Where I live, the freeway signs have both miles and kilometers, and so does my car's speedometer.  Everyone else's speedometer has a kilometer scale in the US as well, because the government forced that upon the auto industry decades ago.  Yet miles remains the dominate scale; because then and now, Americans prefer to think in miles.

The fact you have to use a personal attack shows you obviously can't back up what you say. You have nothing but opinions and logical fallacies.
Show me proof of what you claim instead of just assuming you know what every one in the world thinks and feels.

I do that all the time. Maybe because I can.

Or take the previously mentioned food energy. A bottle of olive oil has 40 MJ of energy. That is 40 megawatt-seconds; it will run a 100 W human or a 100 W lightbulb for 400 000 seconds or a 50 kW car engine 800 seconds. It is also 40 million newton-meters; it will lift a tonne 4 km. This gives a clear grasp of how much energy that is and what it can be used for.

Now, using the same 10 000 kcal bottle of oil, how long can you run a 50 horsepower engine or 0.1 horsepower lightbulb and how many miles can you lift a long and/or short ton?

If that isn't down to earth enough, this weekend I ordered firewood in liters to be put in a space measured in meters. Easy, one cubic meter is 1000 liters. If the firewood had been sold in gallons and the storage space measured in feet, I would have had to bring out a conversion factor and a calculator.

Firewood is never sold in gallons, so you wouldn't have had to worry about it. Firewood is sold by the cord, which is defined in terms of feet.

Both metric and imperial suck.

Metric sucks because it's base 10 and that makes it inconvenient to divide by 3 or 4.

Imperial sucks because it's base 12 system of measurements expressed in a base 10 numeral system.   (ignoring the fact that imperial sometimes uses other bases than 12,  adding even more unnecessary comlplexity)


The ideal system would use base 12 for both measurements and numerals. Or even base 60.

The reason most of the world doesn't use that system has nothing to do with govenment coercion and everything to do with historical precedent/ critical mass.

Same reason most of the world uses QWERTY and not Dvorak keyboards.



We should stick to metric for Bitcoin because metric is already used by most of the world (even Americans) for financial purposes.

Amazing. A special unit of volume just for firewood!

I can't help but take this opportunity to plug natural units: https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Natural_units (https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Natural_units)

But seriously, why choose an arbitrary moving decimal place in the first place?  Lots of countries have a ton of zeros in the smallest useful denomination of their currencies, and it doesn't seem to be a problem (when new ones are not being added).

So my vote is with natural bitcoin units: 1 BTC -> 10^8 BTC = 100 MBTC.

Then again, it's probably way too late to fix this.

+ 1

Gallons / Miles / Pounds suck goat balls.
Meters, Liters FTW !

Natural units are the purest. There isn't really any natural Bitcoin unit, though. The 1/10⁸ limit is just an artifact of the current implementation (and network protocol?). They are potentially infinitely divisible and smaller pieces than the current minimum may be used some day.

Never mind that, there is a natural unit. The total Bitcoin amount (what is now called 21 million) would be 1.

I like it.  And the Thai people will thank us for it  :)

I'd rather have 16 (or some other power of 2). In this age, being compatible with computers trumps making division a bit easier.