Historical question:

[grau]

My two cents:
Currently the US-government has liabilities of a bit more than 15*10^12 $, say roughly 10^13 $.
Taken all of the other liabilities world wide, I guess their sum is limited by $ 10^14.
Moreover I believe all sums of every money availible (converted to US-$ units) is < 10^15 $ at every past point of time.
So if you like to be precise on the level of 0.01 US-cent, you need an integer range up to 10^19.
Hmm ... 2^64 = 1.84...*10^9. Wow, critical close if everybody would use BTC for his business! ;-)
smtp

Bitcoin is cash not liabilities. The magnitude of cash floating around is much less than you calculate.

[dserrano5]

Personally the only thing I wish was different is 1 [...] and 2 make the subsidies base 2 so there would be a "clean" generation (i.e. 64 BTC, 32 BTC 16 BTC, 8 BTC ...  2 satoshi, 1 satoshis 0). 

What would happen when the subsidy was 1 BTC? Half of that is 0.5 BTC and further dividing that by 2 doesn't lead to ... 2 satoshi, 1 satoshi, 0. For that to happen, the subsidy would need to start at 2^n/1e8 BTC, which at n=32 would be 42.94967296 BTC, which is as nerdy as ugly.

[smtp]

My two cents:
Currently the US-government has liabilities of a bit more than 15*10^12 $, say roughly 10^13 $.
Taken all of the other liabilities world wide, I guess their sum is limited by $ 10^14.
Moreover I believe all sums of every money availible (converted to US-$ units) is < 10^15 $ at every past point of time.
So if you like to be precise on the level of 0.01 US-cent, you need an integer range up to 10^19.
Hmm ... 2^64 = 1.84...*10^9. Wow, critical close if everybody would use BTC for his business! ;-)
smtp

Bitcoin is cash not liabilities. The magnitude of cash floating around is much less than you calculate.

? What do you call cash? I tried to estimate official existing nominal money amount. And liabilities should be (far) less than existing money world-wide!

smtp

[smtp]

What would happen when the subsidy was 1 BTC? Half of that is 0.5 BTC and further dividing that by 2 doesn't lead to ... 2 satoshi, 1 satoshi, 0. For that to happen, the subsidy would need to start at 2^n/1e8 BTC, which at n=32 would be 42.94967296 BTC, which is as nerdy as ugly.

The ugly thing is either 10 is no power of 2 or humans are not comfortable to think intuitively in powers of 2! ;-)

smtp

[smtp]

A serious and more non-future aimed thought would e.g. result in:
start with say 2^16/1000 BTC half this every 210000 (or what ever fixed number) of blocks -- better choose the time interval 4 years and a certain distant of 10 mins for a new block, do this for 16*4 = 64 years, then we are at 1 mBTC and then hold this constant for ever! So you have a small linear growth in BTC total.  Then we need no (new/very artifically and arbitrary changable rules for) transaction-fees!

But we should retalk this topic in nearly 64-4 years!

smtp

[grau]

My two cents:
Currently the US-government has liabilities of a bit more than 15*10^12 $, say roughly 10^13 $.
Taken all of the other liabilities world wide, I guess their sum is limited by $ 10^14.
Moreover I believe all sums of every money availible (converted to US-$ units) is < 10^15 $ at every past point of time.
So if you like to be precise on the level of 0.01 US-cent, you need an integer range up to 10^19.
Hmm ... 2^64 = 1.84...*10^9. Wow, critical close if everybody would use BTC for his business! ;-)
smtp

Bitcoin is cash not liabilities. The magnitude of cash floating around is much less than you calculate.

? What do you call cash? I tried to estimate official existing nominal money amount. And liabilities should be (far) less than existing money world-wide!

smtp

Wrong. Liabilities are certainly magnitudes higher than cash (M0).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

[smtp]

Bitcoin is cash not liabilities. The magnitude of cash floating around is much less than you calculate.

Image to go to a business bank in 50 years and asking for a credit. The bank offers you say 10 BTC.
Will you ask: do I get this as cash? :-)
Or if they offer you a 10 MBTC credit -- you are a well-known big-business man and you know that there (will) exists only 21 MBTC world-wide and it is almost the only used currency of importance -- what will you think then?

smtp

[smtp]

Wrong. Liabilities are certainly magnitudes higher than cash (M0).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

Wrong? I did not state anything about this. I ask you why you considered cash only, or better what you called cash? It looks more you don't know what I talk/think about. And thus set money = cash.

Regards
smtp

[notme]

Wrong. Liabilities are certainly magnitudes higher than cash (M0).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_supply

Wrong? I did not state anything about this. I ask you why you considered cash only, or better what you called cash? It looks more you don't know what I talk/think about. And thus set money = cash.

Regards
smtp

What was wrong was the assumption of this statement:

And liabilities should be (far) less than existing money world-wide!

Should be... probably.
Are... certainly not today.

[zebedee]

Like other indicated it was a guestimate and the number of coins (and discrete units) is totally arbitrary.  Personally the only thing I wish was different is 1 use full 64bit (21M BTC * 1E8 =2.1E15, 64bit ulong = 1.84E19) for units and 2 make the subsidies base 2 so there would be a "clean" generation (i.e. 64 BTC, 32 BTC 16 BTC, 8 BTC ...  2 satoshi, 1 satoshis 0). 

Dunno if anyone other than me noticed it (I was once a floating point nut; I contributed the compile-time host- and target-independent FP arithmetic that is in the Clang compiler) but the current usage of 21* 10^6 * 10^8 satoshis means that integer arithmetic in satoshi units (2100000000000000 of them) can be done perfectly within the pure integer part of a double-precision point number.  They have 52 explicit bits, 4503599627370496 possibilities, i.e. double-precision values can be used to do bitcoin arithmetic without fear of loss of precision, bigint or long long integer arithmetic is unnecessary.  Coincidence?  Who knows.

[nibor]

BTW a half Byte, 4 bits, is a nipple.

Half a byte is a nibble, not a nipple.

Classic Freudian slip!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freudian_slip