It's pretty simple, if 1BTC is $20, people will have no problem spending 2-3decimals out.
Try to meet some of these "people" you refer to--regular people don't think like that. And yes, I can say that because I'm probably a bigger geek than you are--I just work in usability and education. No hard feelings
. The lightbulb moment for me was when I sent out
wedding invitations to people who mostly own bitcoins because of me, and didn't get .01 donated despite getting plenty of cash in cards. By contrast, I received over 30 tips from random internet users in the first couple months of this year which have now dried up despite the increased community size and traffic (some pieces I've written have received >15,000 views). People
haven't continued being just as free with smaller portions of money--they've stopped spending them altogether.
People don't spend $20 objects freely when they expect them to be worth $40 tomorrow, and they don't just move the decimal place over mentally. This isn't my opinion--I have a pretty large sample space on this one that makes it an empirical observation about the BitCoin economy.
I think a large part of the problem as well is that if you want to send less than .01 BTC, you have to pay a .01 BTC transaction fee. I understand the reasoning for this, however it has some negative side effects. If I want to send someone the equivalent of $0.05 at the current price of BTC, I have to pay $0.25 to get it there.
