Is fragmentation of bitcoins a problem and a possible attack on the system?
In
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=9685.0 there is a question that did not get answered, and it is not in
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Weaknesses.
The basic idea is that money can get fragmented and if you only have pennies to pay with, transaction costs go up.
If with bitcoins you can spend 10^-8 of a bitcoin, then the pennies might come to have very low value.
An attack might then be performed like this:
Buy 1.01 bc. Spend 1 bc on socks, but use the 0.01 bc to fragment the money sent into anything up to a million equal parts, say only enough to make it more expensive to use.
Whenever that 1 bc is spent, it is more expensive than an unfragmented bc would be.
This might also happen naturally over time when transactions with many decimals are made.
Whether or not this is a problem, perhaps it belongs in the Weaknesses article?
