21million BTC is just over 51 bits of precision...

[Luke-Jr]

Problem is, "TBC" is your own invention, no matter how many times you repeat it.

No problem at all. TBC is an adaptation of the BitCoin currency to the Tonal number system, in the same way as a port of software is an adaptation to a new platform. The only problem is when people work against innovation and progress.

[0x6763]

Floating point is not good for dealing with money.

Subtracting two Doubles on the JVM:

Code:

user> (- 0.8846 0.8524)
0.032200000000000006

Subtracting two Floats on the JVM:

Code:

user> (- (float 0.8846) (float 0.8524))
0.03219998

Neither operation got the accurate answer of 0.0322.

Why floating point is being considered at all is a mystery to me.

[Gavin Andresen]

Why floating point is being considered at all is a mystery to me.

Huh?  Nobody is suggesting that any math be done with floating-point coins.

But even if we were, your first example gives the correct result to the 8-places-of-precision that Bitcoin deals with:
 (round 0.032200000000000006  to 8 places and you get 0.03220000)

[Luke-Jr]

Floating point is not good for dealing with money.

Subtracting two Doubles on the JVM:

Code:

user> (- 0.8846 0.8524)
0.032200000000000006

Subtracting two Floats on the JVM:

Code:

user> (- (float 0.8846) (float 0.8524))
0.03219998

Neither operation got the accurate answer of 0.0322.

Why floating point is being considered at all is a mystery to me.

Those are problems with decimal fractions in floats. Tonal fractions have no such problem, nor do integer values (which I was recommending). A floating-point implementation that cannot handle all possible BitCoin values as integers, is a buggy implementation.

[0x6763]

Perhaps my examples are not the best, and admittedly this is outside of my area of expertise, but my main concern is that I think it goes against best practices to use floating point numbers for money.  Perhaps this is not an issue with the bitcoin client, I don't know.  Using floating point numbers still doesn't sound like a good idea to me, though.

[genjix]

If it's just the JSON api then why not fix it when it becomes a problem? Upgrading an API to a new one is not a problem as much as upgrading a protocol.

The real question is whether the precision should be made larger from int64 to int128

I'm sure the inventors of the internet didn't guess that ipv4 addresses would become exhausted. It's not a big deal to double the precision and much easier to change now than in the future.

[jon_smark]

Why does this discussion have to made over and over again?  Over the ages countless people have been burned by the practice of storing currency values in floating point, which is why nowadays it is conventional wisdom that any application handling money should never, ever use floating point types to store currency. You may think you are saving some space, or being more "efficient", or that you have enough precision, or whatever.  Resist the temptation, seriously. Just say NO!  If you don't, sooner or later that decision will come back to bite you in the ass.

Ever wonder why DBMSs have these awkward looking "numeric" types (sometimes also called "decimal"), where you explicitly specify the precision and the number of decimal places?  It's not because the DBMS people don't know of floating point.  Quite on the contrary.  They know floating point all too well, which is why they don't use it for currency.

[Luke-Jr]

If it's just the JSON api then why not fix it when it becomes a problem? Upgrading an API to a new one is not a problem as much as upgrading a protocol.

It is a problem now.

The real question is whether the precision should be made larger from int64 to int128

It is technically impossible for more than 21 million bitcoins to ever exist. int64 holds the entire quantity of base units. int128 makes no sense on a technical level. Besides, JSON only has "numbers", not int-sizes or floats. Buggy JSON implementations might try to read number-without-a-decimal-point as an int32, which is why the JSON API should require a ".0" after every number. Base units should be used because 1) valid JSON implementations might try making an imprecise float (all are, for 0.1) even when precision is needed, 2) human-readable values should be kept on the GUI, not in low-level internals like APIs, and 3) Not all Bitcoin users want to use the Decimal BitCoin (BTC) divisions.

[casascius]

Problem is, "TBC" is your own invention, no matter how many times you repeat it.

Even though I think "TBC" is silly, if the RPC accepted strings and could either be decimal ones (1234.567) as well as hexadecimal (0x1234.567) then he'd have his Tonal Bitcoins.  It would be up to him to fork it to put those silly 19th-century Mormon Deseret Alphabet looking digits in instead of the hexadecimal the rest of us understand, but anyone who shared the legitimate concern about bitcoins being strictly divisible by ten would have it solved, this could be used to represent exact amounts from IEEE floating point as well.

[Luke-Jr]

Even though I think "TBC" is silly, if the RPC accepted strings and could either be decimal ones (1234.567) as well as hexadecimal (0x1234.567) then he'd have his Tonal Bitcoins.  It would be up to him to fork it to put those silly 19th-century Mormon Deseret Alphabet looking digits in instead of the hexadecimal the rest of us understand, but anyone who shared the legitimate concern about bitcoins being strictly divisible by ten would have it solved, this could be used to represent exact amounts from IEEE floating point as well.

1 BTC != 1 TBC. 0x1234.567 BTC is 6816.287 TBC (6C81C6.E9287 in hexadecimal; it is also impossible, given it contains a fractional 0.7 (Tonal/hex; 0.4375 decimal) base units)

In any case, I don't want RPC to use TBC. I want it to use base units, like all internals/protocols should. Adding a ".0" to the end is only to workaround a known buggy JSON implementation.
 

[casascius]

Even though I think "TBC" is silly, if the RPC accepted strings and could either be decimal ones (1234.567) as well as hexadecimal (0x1234.567) then he'd have his Tonal Bitcoins.  It would be up to him to fork it to put those silly 19th-century Mormon Deseret Alphabet looking digits in instead of the hexadecimal the rest of us understand, but anyone who shared the legitimate concern about bitcoins being strictly divisible by ten would have it solved, this could be used to represent exact amounts from IEEE floating point as well.

1 BTC != 1 TBC. 0x1234.567 BTC is 6816.9287 TBC (6C81C6.E9287 in hexadecimal; it is also impossible, given it contains a fractional 0.7 (Tonal/hex; 0.4375 decimal) base units)

In any case, I don't want RPC to use TBC. I want it to use base units, like all internals/protocols should. Adding a ".0" to the end is only to workaround a known buggy JSON implementation.
 

6816.9287 TBC ==6C81C6.E9287 in hex?
See look you even got your own 9 confused. Isn't 9 in this tonal gibberish really a ten (0xa)?  You have used a 9 in the same spot in your tonal quantity as in hex. If the purported fact that 5+5=9 in bonal trips up even a tonal genius, imagine how much the rest of us want nothing to do with it.