Was it impossible to send less than 0.01btc before Bitcoin version 0.3.21?

[Remsjack]

I recently learned that it was not possible to send amounts fewer than 0.01BTC before the release of Bitcoin version 0.3.21 on April 27th, 2011: is that true or am I missing something?

I guess that because of bitcoin's price at the time it was not really useful to transact less than 0.01BTC but I had always figured that from day one you could send and receive small amounts...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6642.msg97074#msg97074

[AB de Royse777]

Not sure if there were a minimum set back in the days. But I don't think it's safe to use an outdated version of software, especially if it's a piece of software which is targetted by scammers to steal the most valuable asset of the planet right now.

[BlackHatCoiner]

Well, in April 2011 it took parity with dollar (1 BTC = $1), so I guess that there wasn't any purpose to broadcast a transaction valuated in around $0.01 just like you can't now for something smaller than 547 sats. If you check the transactions back in 2011, you'll notice that the majority transferred more than 10 BTC.

Not sure if there were a minimum set back in the days. But I don't think it's safe to use an outdated version of software, especially if it's a piece of software which is targetted by scammers to steal the most valuable asset of the planet right now.

I don't think OP intended to use it, it probably just seemed odd to him.

[dkbit98]

I didn't know that, but I think that this code change happened after Satoshi was gone, so does that mean that all Bitcoin after that is not the real ''Satoshi's Vision''?  
Question for Craig Faketoshi Wright and Roger Ver

[ranochigo]

It is possible since the start. The client version merely introduces the ability for people to create transactions with amounts smaller than that. Anyone could've made a transaction with a satoshi but anything below 0.01BTC for any of the outputs would've triggered the 0.01BTC minimum fees for relaying. The network has always recognize 8 decimal points as the denomination.

[BlackHatCoiner]

It is also advisable to say that being lower than the dust limit doesn't mean that you can't transact that amount. A miner can include his transaction transferring 1 sat from one address to another, it won't be considered invalid from the network. What you can't do is fill nodes' mempool with these small outputs; a DDoS can occur.

[aysg76]

I recently learned that it was not possible to send amounts fewer than 0.01BTC before the release of Bitcoin version 0.3.21 on April 27th, 2011: is that true or am I missing something?

I guess that because of bitcoin's price at the time it was not really useful to transact less than 0.01BTC but I had always figured that from day one you could send and receive small amounts...

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6642.msg97074#msg97074

So this was the statement from Gavin Anderson when he introduced Bitcoin version 0.3.21 here on the forum on 27 April,2011.

* 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).

So maybe it was the network fees that you were not advised to make transaction smaller than 0.01 btc at that time as the prices were also very low.So this could be the reason for this.

[Remsjack]

But I don't think it's safe to use an outdated version of software, especially if it's a piece of software which is targetted by scammers to steal the most valuable asset of the planet right now.

I won't use that version, don't worry, I was just curious! As we are more and more talking about satoshis, especially because of the Lightning Network, I find this topic fascinating.
I like that Satoshi even thought of changing the decimal convention :

Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge.

But don't worry, there are another 6 decimal places that aren't shown, for a total of 8 decimal places internally.  It shows 1.00 but internally it's 1.00000000.  If there's massive deflation in the future, the software could show more decimal places.

If it gets tiresome working with small numbers, we could change where the display shows the decimal point.  Same amount of money, just different convention for where the ","'s and "."'s go.  e.g. moving the decimal place 3 places would mean if you had 1.00000 before, now it shows it as 1,000.00.

Thank you everyone for your answers.