Adding More Decimal Places To Bitcoin Would Not Be Printing More Money

[colinistheman]

Update:

After reading your posts I agree with you all.

Adding decimal places to Bitcoin would not inflate it. It would not harm the currency in any way actually. And may in fact help to allow the usability of Bitcoin when the value requires further divisibility (when the price goes way up per coin).

Thanks for sharing-- it's been a fun topic anyway.  And thanks to those whom shared their thoughts on the subject in a humane fashion.

[MargaretsDream]

Your vote is saved should a voting happen in a distant future

Seriously, if 1 BTC = 1 million USD, then 1 satoshi is worth 1 cent

[Aswan]

Back in the days when I learned about really small units of weight the gram suddenly gained to many more decimals. Yet I could still hold my pen, it didn't get any heavier because there suddenly were more decimals.
When I learned that even in atoms there are smaller things which they are made of, that didn't increase the Number of Atoms of the Number of Particles, of energy inside the universe. It has always been there.
In mathematics, there is an infinite number of decimals consisting of zeros, you just don't use them if you don't need them. And the same goes for bitcoin as well as for any other currency. Some people say the USD has 2 decimals (smallest coin denomination and your bank accounts smallest denomination) while others say it has 3 decimals (oil trading). If there was a difference between those to and if it was a difference of a factor of 10, then one of these 2 kinds of people would have been proven wrong already.

So its not like adding anything, it has always been there, just not available to you. I hope that explains it

[colinistheman]

Your vote is saved should a voting happen in a distant future

Seriously, if 1 BTC = 1 million USD, then 1 satoshi is worth 1 cent

Yeah, it will be a LONG time before that topic ever becomes necessary (over a hundred years).

$1,000,000 USD for one Bitcoin would be amazing but actually not unrealistic. That would mean that the market cap would be  $21,000,000,000,000 (21 trillion) USD.    (21 million coins * $1,000,000 each)

There is more USD than that in circulation at the moment.

[narayan]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

[colinistheman]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

[Aswan]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

They would still have the same amount of bitcoins, only the value increased, like it does now. read my above and you might understand

[BenTuras]

0.01 = 0.010

Adding another decimal does nothing to the value of the number.
One could argue though that the value is more precise (0.01 is the rounded value of 0.0095 to 0.014 and 0.010 is the rounded value of 0.00995 to 0.0104).

Currently most Bitcoin software is limited to 8 decimal positions.
Increasing this to for example 12 positions is a software issue and will not cause any change of value.

It will open the doors to even smaller payments, but we already have enough Bitcoin dust.
(The official software already handles dust).

[tysat]

No adding more decimal places is not like printing more money.

If I have 10/21 million bitcoins, what's the difference in having 100/210 million bitcoins?  None, I have the same proportion of bitcoins as before!

It would probably change things psychologically but from a numbers standpoint it does nothing.

[Gabi]

Adding More Decimal Places To Bitcoin Would Be Printing More Money.

No.

[pgbit]

Adding More Decimal Places To Bitcoin Would Be Printing More Money.

No.

Agreed ^. Changing the position of the decimal point, yes, this could have that effect, but not just adding more zeros. There is some psychology here though about the perception of currency. Most people in US/Euro/UK expect a single unit of any currency to be not worth so much, and bitcoin will contradict this more and more. Anyone got a link for the planned / suggested names of intervening units for bitcoin, between satoshi and bitcoin units?

[phatsphere]

Sure, those who already possessed bitcoin would just have more bitcoin, …

this is completely wrong and voids your entire argument. i suggest you to go back to basic school and learn about the meaning of decimals.
e.g. https://www.khanacademy.org/math/arithmetic/decimals/decimal_place_value/v/decimal-place-value

[Serge]

i would love to cut an apple on 2 half's and end up having 2 whole apples


0.1 =/= 1

[westkybitcoins]

Wouldn't adding more decimal places be effectively be printing money? It would literally be creating more money availability out of thin air.

If Bernanke took a truckload of pennies, chopped them into 1/4 cents, kept the face value (0.25 cents each) and started paying all U.S. expenses with them instead of with dollar bills, checks or wire transfers, would anyone be any richer? Would that be "printing money?"

[hayek]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

You are failing economics hard.

Every bitcoin would be affected. There would be no increase in value. If we added a single decimal everything that cost 1 BTC would then cost 10BTC, 2 decimals 100BTC. Math mother f'er do you speak it?

[Serge]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

You are failing economics hard.

Every bitcoin would be affected. There would be no increase in value. If we added a single decimal everything that cost 1 BTC would then cost 10BTC, 2 decimals 100BTC. Math mother f'er do you speak it?

you got it wrong too, if you add more decimals, 1 Bitcoin is still equal to 1 Bitcoin, you simply create a new name for  1/1000 BTC which equals to 1 [new unit name here] and which assumes 1000 of 1/1000BTCs and life goes on..  you do same with 1/10,000 or however else it needs to be split up further in the future, but 1 bitcoin always will equal 1 bitcoin.

[Ozymandias]

So if I'm understanding correctly, twenty nickels is more money than a dollar, and a hundred pennies is even more money than that! I suppose that would be true if "more" referred to the mass of the currency (100 pennies weighs more than 20 nickels which weighs more than 1 dollar bill and even then it shouldn't matter as "bitcoin" is effectively massless), but if "more" refers to the value of the money, then the assertion in the OP is categorically false.

[Serge]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

You are failing economics hard.

Every bitcoin would be affected. There would be no increase in value. If we added a single decimal everything that cost 1 BTC would then cost 10BTC, 2 decimals 100BTC. Math mother f'er do you speak it?

you got it wrong too, if you add more decimals, 1 Bitcoin is still equal to 1 Bitcoin, you simply create a new name for  1/1000 BTC which equals to 1 [new unit name here] and which assumes 1000 of 1/1000BTCs and life goes on..  you do same with 1/10,000 or however else it needs to be split up further in the future, but 1 bitcoin always will equal 1 bitcoin.

point is, this doesn't create more money, it's simply a convenience to escape using long decimals as value of bitcoin increases, we will be using smaller bitcoin fractions.

[knight22]

If I'm breaking a gold bar in two. Do I have more gold? or Does my gold worth more??

No.

Adding more zeros does not change anything to the value nor the supply at all. It just allows more smaller piece so everyone can have some if a satoshi comes to worth a lot. That's all

[hayek]

Adding more decimals would not be printing more money. Remember when we had the half penny?

Yeah but then you could just keep arbitrarily adding decimal places again and again. Suddenly the Bitcoin economy would look like this:  21,000,000.0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000001

That's a lot of units of currency.

I suppose the bitcoin-rich would be even richer in a situation like that.

You are failing economics hard.

Every bitcoin would be affected. There would be no increase in value. If we added a single decimal everything that cost 1 BTC would then cost 10BTC, 2 decimals 100BTC. Math mother f'er do you speak it?

you got it wrong too, if you add more decimals, 1 Bitcoin is still equal to 1 Bitcoin, you simply create a new name for  1/1000 BTC which equals to 1 [new unit name here] and which assumes 1000 of 1/1000BTCs and life goes on..  you do same with 1/10,000 or however else it needs to be split up further in the future, but 1 bitcoin always will equal 1 bitcoin.

I would accept that I am failing semantics ;-)

The value is what is important to me. No one would become richer through changing the decimal point unless that change somehow added value.