Using percentage of bitcoins instead of number of bitcoins

[danalex]

What about a protocol that used the figures in percentage (in scientific notation, sure) relatively the totality of bitcoins instead of a number of bitcoins that is completly arbitarily. As far as I understand there is no reason why the maximum number of bitcoins tends to 21 million and not another such big number.
Using percentages the values could be expressed in a simillar way, using decimal.
You could simply stipulate that the decimal value, in this protocol, would mean percentage of the totality of bitcoins, and still all be the same, and the values having eight decimal places on the right.
Maybe you would need rounding at some point. I'm not sure.
What do you think?

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[finkleshnorts]

I'm not exactly sure what you are saying here, but that's how I tend to think of my bitcoins. And it's also what keeps me from doing anything too stupid with them. In theory.

[knight22]

It's an interesting point of view. Of course at the end of the day it is the exact same thing but maybe that notation can be easier to handle than the actual one (in a long term run). On the other hand, the paradigm shift is probably too hard to do for the majority of people but I think it can be great to try somehow.

[knight22]

I think it can be done with the same protocol and the same amount of bitcoin supply. It's just a notation shift. Is that what you really mean?

[FreeMoney]

On some level I wish there was only 1 bitcoin and we all used parts of it. Would make the haters even more furious. "OMG ROFL 1 bitcoin economy!!"

[nimda]

It is certainly implementable on the client-side. At the protocol level, there are only satoshis. So any client can take the number of satoshis received in a transaction and display it divided by 21,000,000,000,000 (and tack a percent sign on it).

[danalex]

Indeed, just a notation shift.

[Stephen Gornick]

What about a protocol that used the figures in percentage (in scientific notation, sure) relatively the totality of bitcoins instead of a number of bitcoins that is completly arbitarily.

The protocol only knows satoshis (1 satoshi = 0.00000001 BTC).  So the client display code is what knows the concept of a bitcoin.   So you are simply describing a change to the display portion of client code.  

You code create a fork of the Bitcoin-qt client to do this.

I can't think of a single person who would want it (except maybe some mathematicians who might like the novel look) but there isn't any technical reason this couldn't be done today.

[FreeMoney]

Displaying as the percent of mined coins would be slightly interesting. I think there is a group that wants money to disappear over time, might be a good feel for them.