Moving the decimal

[herb]

This is probably a dumb idea, but it occurred to me this morning and I thought I'd throw it out there so that people can bash it.

There has been some discussion that 21,000,000 bitcoins will lead to a price so high that the decimals become a pain to work with. For example, if BTC reaches $500,000USD each, a value meal would run you .00001BTC. Yeah, of course we could just call it "10 millibits". It just seems ineloquent. What if we just moved the decimal back by a couple places. This could probably be done with relative ease in the software. It could be implemented on a certain block #. Then there could be 2,100,000,000 "two point one billion" bitcoins. Every bitcoin already in existence would be 100x more bitcoins but would have the same value:

Before the split you would have: 1BTC  =  $500,000USD
After the split you would have: 100BTC = $500,000USD

The value of a bitcoin would go from: 1BTC = $500,000
To: 1BTC = $5,000

I confess that it would be confusing for many people temporarily, but the confusion would pass and the system would become easier to use. This would in effect be like a stock split. It would also probably help the value increase even more as people like the idea of buying one whole unit of something, more people would buy a small amount.

I am NOT arguing that 21,000,000 is not enough BTC for commerce. I fully understand the infinite divisibility of BTC. My argument is that the human mind would prefer to work with INTEGERS and not with decimals or millibits. Comments?

[nobbynobbynoob]

mBTC, µBTC and satoshi values are integers (always in the case of the latter on the blockchain).

I don't see the difficulty with mBTC, µBTC and satoshi TBH - these terms can be abbreviated if need be, "mills", "millies", "mikes", etc.? - and in fact now consider it important that exchanges, charts and other resources at least offer the option of redenominating. I finally switched the base denomination in my Bitcoin-Qt to mBTC and boy do I feel "rich"!

mBTC FTW, at least until those are worth hundreds of today's dollars!

[kokojie]

This is probably a dumb idea, but it occurred to me this morning and I thought I'd throw it out there so that people can bash it.

There has been some discussion that 21,000,000 bitcoins will lead to a price so high that the decimals become a pain to work with. For example, if BTC reaches $500,000USD each, a value meal would run you .00001BTC. Yeah, of course we could just call it "10 millibits". It just seems ineloquent. What if we just moved the decimal back by a couple places. This could probably be done with relative ease in the software. It could be implemented on a certain block #. Then there could be 2,100,000,000 "two point one billion" bitcoins. Every bitcoin already in existence would be 100x more bitcoins but would have the same value:

Before the split you would have: 1BTC  =  $500,000USD
After the split you would have: 100BTC = $500,000USD

The value of a bitcoin would go from: 1BTC = $500,000
To: 1BTC = $5,000

I confess that it would be confusing for many people temporarily, but the confusion would pass and the system would become easier to use. This would in effect be like a stock split. It would also probably help the value increase even more as people like the idea of buying one whole unit of something, more people would buy a small amount.

I am NOT arguing that 21,000,000 is not enough BTC for commerce. I fully understand the infinite divisibility of BTC. My argument is that the human mind would prefer to work with INTEGERS and not with decimals or millibits. Comments?

No, at 1 BTC = $500,000 USD, you would just buy a burger for 500 satoshi, you don't have to use decimal