Bitcoin's 21million total coin supply hinders it immensely

[twiifm]

The math isn't that complicated.  Sounds like the problem is with the public education system, not Bitcoin.  Instead of dumbing down Bitcoin, perhaps the sheeple need to wisen up.

Seriously though, thank you. In my opinion BTC will hopefully bring about changes in the way people think about their government issued fiat currencies, and realize that they don't have to be dependent of that. But it is not for everybody. Seriously people, decimal places are Not that hard to understand...  Why should we dumb down our system just to accommodate the ignorant masses?

"Ignorant masses"  LOL.  Without mass adoption BTC or anything else for that matters will become extinct

[krodmandoon]

Wait, counting in base ten is confusing? Decimals are too hard?

Please explain how you learned this extremely complex system:

$1.00 =  100% of 1 dollar
$0.25 =  25% of 1 dollar
$0.10 =  10% of 1 dollar
$0.01 =  1% of 1 dollar

BTC1 = 100% of one BTC
etc
etc
etc

and so on and so forth. BTC is far more divisible and the fact that there will only be 21M is simply an argument to strengthen the thought that Satoshis may very well end up the major unit of usage for the general public.

I'm just glad that we don't have to worry about inflation and words like decabitcoin and the like.

[twiifm]

Wait, counting in base ten is confusing? Decimals are too hard?

Please explain how you learned this extremely complex system:

$1.00 =  100% of 1 dollar
$0.25 =  25% of 1 dollar
$0.10 =  10% of 1 dollar
$0.01 =  1% of 1 dollar

BTC1 = 100% of one BTC
etc
etc
etc

and so on and so forth. BTC is far more divisible and the fact that there will only be 21M is simply an argument to strengthen the thought that Satoshis may very well end up the major unit of usage for the general public.

I'm just glad that we don't have to worry about inflation and words like decabitcoin and the like.

The OPs point I believe.  Is that dividing the coins down to 8 decimal places is cumbersome.  Has nothing to do with math and everything to do with pragmatics

[bountygiver]

Wait, counting in base ten is confusing? Decimals are too hard?

Please explain how you learned this extremely complex system:

$1.00 =  100% of 1 dollar
$0.25 =  25% of 1 dollar
$0.10 =  10% of 1 dollar
$0.01 =  1% of 1 dollar

BTC1 = 100% of one BTC
etc
etc
etc

and so on and so forth. BTC is far more divisible and the fact that there will only be 21M is simply an argument to strengthen the thought that Satoshis may very well end up the major unit of usage for the general public.

I'm just glad that we don't have to worry about inflation and words like decabitcoin and the like.

The OPs point I believe.  Is that dividing the coins down to 8 decimal places is cumbersome.  Has nothing to do with math and everything to do with pragmatics

Then just use miliBTC or nanoBTC

[twiifm]

Then just use miliBTC or nanoBTC

Why didn't Satoshi just set total BTC amount to 21 Trillion?  Its just an arbitrary number.  Ever thought of that? 

[Taras]

21,000,000 BTC
or
21,000,000,000 mBTC
or
21,000,000,000,000 uBTC
or
2,100,000,000,000,000 sats

People just need to think like cents instead of dollars, like in the early 1800s

[shawshankinmate37927]

"Ignorant masses"  LOL.  Without mass adoption BTC or anything else for that matters will become extinct

Enough people have already adopted Bitcoin to make it viable.  There are more people now using Bitcoin than there are using many of the currencies of the countries on this list.  "Mass adoption" might be nice, but isn't necessary for Bitcoin to continue to succeed.

[bryant.coleman]

Actually it is one of the plus points of the BTC. It gives the BTC advantage over fiat, as inflation will not be applicable to it.

[shawshankinmate37927]

Why didn't Satoshi just set total BTC amount to 21 Trillion?  Its just an arbitrary number.  Ever thought of that? 

Correct, it's just an arbitrary number.  It doesn't matter how many pieces you initially decide to cut the pie into.  What matters is that you are able to keep cutting each piece into smaller pieces.

[Joe_Bauers]

Bitcoin has a 21 total of 21million coins that could ever be produced.

That's 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis (BTC0.00000001).

If that ever becomes an issue then a soft fork can add more digits.

This is a non-issue.

Exactly. Coin supply is irrelevant.  This is one thing that many don't seem to grasp on coinmarketcap. I'm thinking of creating trillion-trillion coin and being number 1 on the list 

[Newmine]

Hals post to Satoshi on sourceforge the first week of bitcoin was speculating each coins worth to eventually be $10 million. That is just insane and ridiculous. It will never get there just for the fact that Satoshis coins are dormant and most likely belong to him/them. Giving them astronomical wealth. That to me is what most likely could doom bitcoin. 1 man has too much for nothing.  And every person who wasn't there today and every day since will not adopt because the are disadvantaged.


Edit link to Hals and Satoshis correspondence:
http://sourceforge.net/p/bitcoin/mailman/message/21312757/

[serenitys]

Question?

Might be a stupid question, a naive question, or a good question - don't know yet, still learning - but it is a legit question to better understand the concept going on with the division part.

I get the whole btc and the division into units in per centages part, though I am still shaky on what they'd be called per se. What I'm asking is that the units that are created in the division, are they also able to increase in value according to the valuation of the whole bitcoin at any given time? I'm trying to understand if this applies or not.

Like 1btc is the equivalent of (or "worth") $100 usd, and .50btc is worth half that, or $50, and on down the line. If, I have .25 btc (whatever it's called), and the "whole" btc triples value to $300, what's the value then of the .25? Does it increase to .75 or is it a hard devaluation and it's always worth .25 no matter the overall value of the whole?

What is a satoshi "worth" or how much of the whole is it - how does that work?

Don't throw shit, this is confusing and new  

[grifferz]

If you think it is that necessary, start drafting the BIP, or switch to a coin that has your desired 11 decimal places (wtf?) to begin with.

Your apparently perma-state of amazingness prevents you from reading correctly. I proposed 10K million UNITS. Not decimal places. If you want to Wow-Such-Amaze yourself even more, realize that im proposing here :

10,000,000,000.00000000

Omg. Very numbers. much headache.

You need to understand that in the protocol the unit is the satoshi and the value is just the number of those. Having 8 decimal places in Bitcoin is just the wallet's way of displaying that; it's not doing floating point maths in the protocol. As a consequence it really doesn't matter where you put the decimal point as these are just abstract numbers.

So the maximum possible number of units for Bitcoin is 2,100,000,000,000,000, and you are proposing an altcoin with a maximum of 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 - only around 476 times more.

Hopefully you can see that if the supply limit is a problem then a coin with a supply 476 times higher probably isn't going to be enough. Also I hope you can see that it's rather pointless worrying about this non-issue now when it would be a lot more productive to see at what level usage settles at and soft fork if necessary.

You must admit that if you created an altcoin right now with the properties you describe, it would almost certainly be a flop as it would get no traction compared to bitcoin, which probably explains why the only people seriously discussing this are the ones who don't understand and are inventing work for hypothetical other people to carry out.

[grifferz]

What is a satoshi "worth" or how much of the whole is it - how does that work?

Don't throw shit, this is confusing and new  

I think you're American so right now you are used to the common names of some denominations of US coinage - cent, nickel, dime, quarter. You know that they go:

• cent - one hundredth of a dollar
• nickel - five hundredths of a dollar
• dime - ten hundredths (tenth) of a dollar
• quarter - twenty five hundredths of a dollar

This is so obvious to you that you probably never even really think about it that way.

Similarly there are one thousand millibits (mBTC) in a BTC, or one million microbits (uBTC). The absolute smallest amount of bitcoin that can be represented in the protocol right now is called a satoshi and it is BTC0.00000001.

A mBTC is always going to be one thousandth of a BTC in the same way that a ¢ is always going to be one hundredth of a $.

So whatever value one BTC has, a mBTC always has one thousandth of that value. For example, BTC1 is currently worth about $422 so mBTC1 is currently worth about $0.42.

The only reason why this seems hard is because you aren't familiar with it.

I believe that once the price of Bitcoin levels out in relation to common fiat currencies then we will settle on working in one denomination, whether that be the whole bitcoin, millibitcoin or microbitcoin.

The extra digits will be there but at the level chosen they will be so small as to not really be worth considering, like when you do a currency conversion to US dollar and end up with something like $123.527548262 - The $123.52 is the interesting part.

[paulsonnumismatics]

You need to understand that in the protocol the unit is the satoshi and the value is just the number of those. Having 8 decimal places in Bitcoin is just the wallet's way of displaying that; it's not doing floating point maths in the protocol. As a consequence it really doesn't matter where you put the decimal point as these are just abstract numbers.
 

The protocol name is Bitcoin, thanks. Not SatoshiCoin. The unit is Bitcoin and the decimals are called unnoficially satoshis. Cmon... O_O

Hopefully you can see that if the supply limit is a problem then a coin with a supply 476 times higher probably isn't going to be enough.

#BecauseIsaySo O_O Actually yes, i think its going to be enough, thats why i proposed that in first place.
I have explained myself sufficiently. One BTC for every person in the planet. With enough fractional power to be ultra manageable. Yes, i do care about the last person in Haiti. Because ultimately, this is a push of the technology to reshape the current financial conditions of everyone, at least is what i think.

I agree with you on one thing, though.This conversation is pointless but hey, we are just hanging out here in the forum :-)

[grifferz]

Hopefully you can see that if the supply limit is a problem then a coin with a supply 476 times higher probably isn't going to be enough.

#BecauseIsaySo O_O Actually yes, i think its going to be enough, thats why i proposed that in first place.

Okay, on the one hand we have your "because I say so", on the other hand here is some maths.

You desire for Bitcoin to have enough supply for everyone in the world to have a whole one. You want to achieve this by multiplying the supply a factor of 476. For sake of differentiation let's call your Bitcoin modification a Paulcoin.

If a Paulcoin has 476 times the supply of Bitcoin and everything else being equal then

1 paulcoin = 0.00210084 bitcoin

Meaning that if we never did investigate this Paulcoin, the inhabitant of this hypothetical future world that you envision will have a bitcoin that they can only divide 210 thousand times in comparison to your ideal of 100 million times.

My point is that a minimum unit 210 thousand times smaller than the whole is not practically any different to a minimum unit 100 million times smaller than the whole and that even if we assume a limited supply is a problem, what you have suggested is not significantly different than the status quo.

No one is going to be worrying that they can only divide it 210 thousand times, not 100 million times. No one is going to be limited by that.

It would be like someone saying that the US cent is unwieldy and they wished they had something worth 0.00000476 cents instead. The difference being that if it actually somehow did become unwieldy then it could be fixed in software anyway!

Again I have to say, if your argument is that a limited supply is a real issue, simply multiplying that limit by 40 or 476 as we have seen in this topic so far is not going to make too much of a difference. I would think you'd need to consider a coin with a continual yearly supply.

[Boussac]

The point has been made that we would be better off if the currency units had a distinct name from the network and technology (Bitcoin).
I like Fin and Fins as suggested as a tribute to Hal Finney.

We could have 1 fin = 0.001 BTC so that the money supply limit would be 21 Billion fins, a number that is more acceptable by the lay person.

[Soros Shorts]

Shit, if you can't handle all those zeros, decimal places and precision just use scientific notation.

1 Satoshi: 1.00e-8
21 million: 0.21e+8

[franky1]

21million does not hinder anything apart from the day bitcoin is as widely acceptable as gold. bare with me:

in comparison gold, there is only 171,000 tonnes of gold. yes everyone would love to own a tonne of gold each, but they cant. so instead they buy bars, ounces, grams, etc. even then people would love to afford to own not a whole "tonne", but atleast a whole "bar", because they know that telling their friends they own a "bar" is a nice thing to say. and so there are ingots, ounces and grams for the divisions of gold

bitcoin is divisible by 8 decimals. so like gold people will buy divisions of bitcoin, all will funny names that get developed in the future, EG (maybe: Bitmills, Ksats)

the better part of bitcoin is storage, transmission and also the fact that it cant be faked by having a thin layer of bitcoin molded around a cheap altcoin, and trying to be sold as a real authentic bitcoin.

in the future people will compare the term:
"100 grams of gold" to "100sat of bitcoin"
"gold bars" to "bitmills"
"gold ounces" to "microbitcoins"
etc etc, whatever the terms may be

now lets get back to the point:
so lets continue using the gold vs bitcoin
the rarity 171k gold tonnes vs 21m bitcoins

on the bases of rarity (ignoring price) 1 tonne is as rare as 122.8bitcoin. now lets price that up
1 Tonne of gold is worth £26,684,500 (based on a spot price of £830 per ounce, multiplied by 32,500 ounces to give you the tonne figure)

if we divide that £26.6845 million price valuation by the equivalent rarity amount 122.8btc, then we get a bitcoin rarity value of £217,288.07(~$300k for you yanks) per bitcoin, (when bitcoin gets as popular as gold and demand requires it)

simply put, on a rarity scale compared to gold. 1 bitcoin is the equivalent to roughly £200k/$300k (rounded numbers so don't knit-pick)

which is more then enough, because this allows for each person of all 7 billion to only need to invest £651.86 (to own 0.000031btc) where £1(~$1.50) is 4 or 5 satoshi

which makes it harder to transmit under 20p (30c). so i agree "Bitcoin's 21million total coin supply hinders it immensely"
but here is the kicker.....

when £1 ($1.50) is worth 5sat due to being as widely or more accepted than gold, we would be talking about decades not weeks. and at that time 1 loaf of bread, 2 litres of milk will cost in fiat terms over £$10 due to government fit printing (inflation), making under 20p/30c fiat amounts useless where nothing can be bought that cheap.

so the kicker is scale-ability of bitcoin will work, and 21million does not hinder anything, unless 7 billion people invested 3 weeks wages into bitcoin right now, before governments have finished fucking up the fiat printing inflation.

[BitOnyx]

I think this topic is irrelevant. Have you ever used Yen currency ? Bitcoin numbers will be something like that just opposite. Right now 1 ¥ = 0.009642$