Just trying to figure something out.

[Rogue]

I know each block rewards 50 BTC as of right now. but im still trying to figure out why we use whole BTC for payments. Why dont we use 1satoshi = $0.01. wouldnt this make more sense so that way we start at the lost possible payment and leave the rest of the decimals open for the monetary expansion of BTC so eventually .00100000BTC = $1000?

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[evoorhees]

Yes let's do this!

How many satoshis would you like to buy from me for $0.01 each?  I'll give you a 20% discount if you buy more than 100 million of them. 

[deepceleron]

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

Binaries for Bitcoin version 0.3.21 are available at:
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/bitcoin/files/Bitcoin/bitcoin-0.3.21/

Changes and new features from the 0.3.20 release include:

* Universal Plug and Play support.  Enable automatic opening of a port
for incoming connections by running bitcoin or bitcoind with the
- -upnp=1 command line switch or using the Options dialog box.

* Support for full-precision bitcoin amounts.  You can now send, and
bitcoin will display, bitcoin amounts smaller than 0.01.  However,
sending fewer than 0.01 bitcoins still requires a 0.01 bitcoin fee (so
you can send 1.0001 bitcoins without a fee, but you will be asked to
pay a fee if you try to send 0.0001).

* A new method of finding bitcoin nodes to connect with, via DNS A
records. Use the -dnsseed option to enable.

For developers, changes to bitcoin's remote-procedure-call API:

* New rpc command "sendmany" to send bitcoins to more than one address
in a single transaction.

* Several bug fixes, including a serious intermittent bug that would
sometimes cause bitcoind to stop accepting rpc requests.

* -logtimestamps option, to add a timestamp to each line in debug.log.

* Immature blocks (newly generated, under 120 confirmations) are now
shown in listtransactions.


SHA1-checksums for the binary files are:

54254cba039b02a2f49fdc98b8fe820d0fd4e410  bitcoin-0.3.21-linux.tar.gz
3f94d6a8b08c455a7886561089270247eaada7b4  bitcoin-0.3.21-win32-setup.exe
f9a39404433b01b5a22225855f42275c1c902c26  bitcoin-0.3.21-win32.zip
(mac version should be ready soon)

Thanks to all those who contributed to this release:

Dan Helfman
Dan Loewenherz
devrandom
Eric Swanson
gjs278
Jeff Garzik
Luke Dashjr
Matt Corallo
Matt Giuca
Nils Schneider
ojab
Pieter Wuille
sandos
Santiago M. Mola
Sven Slootweg

Gavin Andresen   gavinandresen@gmail.com
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The minimum amount that the client could send used to be in increments of .01. However it was increased to full precision. The valuation in other currencies has little to do with bitcoin's location of the decimal point though, it's still useable if it becomes worth a million times more.

[Rogue]

Yes let's do this!

How many satoshis would you like to buy from me for $0.01 each?  I'll give you a 20% discount if you buy more than 100 million of them. 

No thanks lol...im just saying why are we starting in the middle of the BTC's but that i mean since BTC can expand up to 21mil why start at BTC#1 instead of building up BTC from its lowest possible form of satoshi.

Does it have to deal with the coding of mining BTC?

[deepceleron]

Your exact question is hard to decipher.

When Bitcoin was created, it was decided that half of the bitcoins that will ever exist will be distributed within four years (then one-fourth of the remaining bitcoins will be distributed in the next four years, and so on). It was also decided that the total amount of bitcoins that will ever exist will be 21 million. For a new transaction block every 10 minute, that makes the mining reward start at 50 BTC per block.

After someone has earned 50 BTC, we could make it so only whole units of 1 BTC could be sent, but that would make it very hard to expand as a worldwide currency - you could only send the equivalent of $11 increments at today's valuation, and only 10 million people could have one bitcoin each. So 1 BTC was made to be comprised of 100,000,000 "base units" called satoshis, so that it could be useful for a globally sized economy, so that even very small fractions can be sent.

Then some people started trading them for things. Like 10,000 of them for a pizza, 1000 of them for a dollar, and it started to have a tangible value in terms of real goods and other currencies. Whatever that value is or might become, Bitcoin is ready.

[Rogue]

Your exact question is hard to decipher.

When Bitcoin was created, it was decided that half of the bitcoins that will ever exist will be distributed within four years (then one-fourth of the remaining bitcoins will be distributed in the next four years, and so on). It was also decided that the total amount of bitcoins that will ever exist will be 21 million. For a new transaction block every 10 minute, that makes the mining reward start at 50 BTC per block.

After someone has earned 50 BTC, we could make it so only whole units of 1 BTC could be sent, but that would make it very hard to expand as a worldwide currency - you could only send the equivalent of $11 increments at today's valuation, and only 10 million people could have one bitcoin each. So 1 BTC was made to be comprised of 100,000,000 "base units" called satoshis, so that it could be useful for a globally sized economy, so that even very small fractions can be sent.

OK this makes a lot of sense so the reason why we started at whole BTC's instead of the Satoshi base units was because of mining and population. So the satoshi was just added on to expand BTC and its population.

One more question are satoshis permanently limited to the 8 decimal places or would/could it be expanded?

[deepceleron]

One more question are satoshis permanently limited to the 8 decimal places or would/could it be expanded?

The rules of bitcoin are encoded in the software and enforced by the majority of the miners and mining pools that use that software, however change is possible. If a major change to bitcoin were desireable, it would have to get through the approval process to be included in the software, and then a majority of the users, especially those who mine blocks, would have to start using the new version of the software. Smaller changes to how bitcoin works have been similarly rolled out, where the change to new rule (such as more efficient network communication) will take place far in the future so there is lots of time for users to adopt a new version.