Bitcoin future? Figure it out.

[Yugtobor]

BTC

 When I first discovered bitcoin for myself I thought it was amazing. I read everything that had anything to do with Bitcoin to try to understand exactly what Bitcoin is. I bought my first few Bitcoins months after Bitcoins came into existense and I was telling all my friends and family members about how Bitcoin is going to revolutionize trading online, and even the global economy as we know it.
  Ok, now that I've been around Bitcoin for awhile, perhaps I can help another adventurer avoid suffering what will be the eventual collapse of Bitcoin. Bitcoin is amazing, and it is the 'wooden wheel' of future digital currency technology but it is only destined - ultimately to failure. You could go out and spend $40,000 on graphics cards with liquid nitrogen cooling and hash rates through the roof, and you might even make a little money. Hopefully before the next big digital currency comes out you'll be able to at least recover what you've invested.
  Bitcoin is up!! Bitcoin might even go a little higher, but get out when you have the chance.
 Mankind has improved on every type of technology that has ever been invented, and Bitcoin will not be an exception to the rule. Bitcoin can be improved in many ways. One improvement would be to allow for a much larger number of units that would eventually be available. Many pro Bitcoin people will tell you that Bitoin can be divided by several decimal places allowing for enough currency to provide everyone interested with the ability to obtain some Bitcoins. Really? who wants .0000001 of something? If the total amount of Bitcoins ever to be made available is going to be 21,000,000 (twenty one million), and a healthy global online economy strives in the trillions of dollars, you're going to be exchanging merchandise in the .00000 somethings,.. that's just stupid.
  Are we not all getting tired of banks charging a service fee for holding/using our money? Why would you pay someone a fee online to hang onto your digital currency when you can manage your own wallet? I'll tell you why,. because if you're just getting interested in Bitcoin now and you want to update a brand new wallet it will take you on the order of days to weeks connected to the internet trying to synchronize your wallet to get it up to date. Don't bother trying to make any transations while your wallet is synchronizing either, it won't work until your wallet is fully synchronized. Bitcoin hasn't been around for very long, and I already feel sorry for the poor bastard three years from now who tries to synchronize his wallet - years?
 Yes bitcoin is cool, and it may even be a collector's item, but don't sink your second mortgage into Bitcoin investment thinking that it's the only thing that will ever exist like it,.. there are already copycats out there - not quite as cool or effective but still an example of alternatives.
 Faster, more efficient, just as safe, larger quantity and more anonymous than any other currency will be some of the improvements on the NewBitcoin, and she won't be too far behind her old sister.


Do you want .0000001 of something? I didn't think so.

[mobile4ever]

The downloading slowness is being addressed and can also be attributed to the particular operating system being used.

[CannedHeat]

Do you want .0000001 of something? I didn't think so.

Well yeah if that something is one day worth a ton of money!

[OurSUBMARINEGo]

Depends. How much is this .0000001% worth in this scenario?

[niko]

Do you want .0000001 of something? I didn't think so.

Yes. Give me 0.0000001 of 100 tons of gold. Or 0.0000001 of the GDP of the United States or Japan.
I will let you think about this, and I hope you will think. Don't rush, take your time.

Also, if the "problem" still bothers you, just express the price in mBTC or μBTC. Problem solved. Even today's reference client lets you do this.

[luffy]

i think Yugtobor means that the number as a number seems a little stupid. I agree,
but even with euros or dollars we have the term "cents" meaning a smaller amount of the currency.
Thus in case of BTC we already have "sitoshis" as i see in some sites (1 sitoshi = 0.00000001 BTC)
Then, if you say i have 1000 sitoshis (which means 0.00001 btc), as a number is more cool
And who knows what you can do with 1000 sitoshis in the future

[Derrickc]

It's like splitting stock: optically looks/feels better, but it's only psychological.  When we hit the 21mm btc limit, if demand keeps going up the valuation will continue to skyrocket and .xxx01 btc will be worth alot

[paradigm]

I doubt the fractional denominations will be much of an issue considering it can automatically be handled in software to convert the amount to the value in local currency.

Regarding synchronizing, I used bitcoin-qt at first and ran into what you are speaking of.  Multibit seems better suited and does not require full syncs from what I understand.  Anecdotally here anyway it is faster.

[buddhacoiner]

Yugtobor,  your issues have definitely been addressed by the responses so far.  Exactly what I wanted to say.  Perhaps you sold your coins far too soon and want back in at a lower price? 

[wonderbash]

It is indeed hard to express bitcoins in that many decimal places, that's why we have mbtc and ubtc, just as we have micro, nano in real life to measure something on a small scale. I don't think that this will be a problem as the most conventional unit will be used throughout the time as bitcoin mature. Just take the cpu processor speed as an example, we refer to them as 1ghz, 2ghz etc instead of 1 000 000 000 hertz.

However, I do agree with you that the traditional bitcoin wallet takes a really long time for it to sync up. Fortunately, there are alternatives that let you sync with a network.