We dont have enough decimal places.

[cafucafucafu]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

[Morecoin Freeman]

I think I do not agree.

Anyway, we have enough decimal places for now. In the future bitcoins source code can always be updated/improved.
Just like fiat currencies got updates over time. Nothing to worry about here.

[R2D221]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

Why do you think so? Do you have a source of the amount of world currencies? Because I couldn't find any...

[deepestfear]

There is no reason more cannot be added if needed, or so I understand

[MineForeman.com]

You may be right, after all there are 134,000,000,000,000 US cents in circulation so there are only ~15 times more satoshis than that!

Lucky we can upgrade the decimal point precision isn't it?

[R2D221]

This has been discussed before. It appears that the total amount of bitcoins was enough to cover M1 in 2008.

I remember this discussion, actually. 

Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be.  Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply.  Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world's M1 money supply at that time was. 

We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure. 

21Million, times 10^8 subdivisions, meant that even if the whole word's money supply were replaced by the 21 million bitcoins the smallest unit (we weren't calling them Satoshis yet)  would still be worth a bit less than a penny, so no matter what happened -- even if the entire economy of planet earth were measured in Bitcoin -- it would never inconvenience people by being too large a unit for convenience.

Not sure if it still applies today, though.

[Q7]

That's enough for now. I don't think we have seen any shortage thus far. When the coins have been fully distributed, it's still not too late the revise the decimal point.

[inBitweTrust]

This is a wonderful problem to have that already has multiple trouble free solutions. Add 3 more decimal places with a soft fork and/or sidechains(sorry for repeating this cliche).

A hard fork isn't even needed.

[Brewins]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

we refuse to reach moon even with so few digits.

Let's think about it when BTC gets closer to be a global currency

[pooya87]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

this can always be changed, i mean the updates can change the amount of decimal places at anytime if necessary. also there is still a long way to become a "Global" currency

[s.mouse]

I believe it is enough, but if it isn't like others have said more places can be added. Besides, the bigger the demand of bitcoin the higher the value bitcoin will become so even 1 satoshi could be worth something in the future.

[Cryddit]

The penny argument was why the smallest unit is no bigger than 1e-8 bitcoin; On the other side of it, there is also an  important reason why it couldn't be smaller than 1e-8.  IEEE "double" floating point format has 53-bit precision.  So if the total number of units had been too much more than 21e14, then people doing math with doubles could get wrong answers due to rounding errors.

I didn't think this was particularly important at the time because using a float format to represent money units is STOOPID in the first place.  But apparently it's more important than I thought; In several scripting languages (cough Javascript cough) it turns out that it's actually a bit difficult to use anything else.  


EDIT:  I got some of the numbers blatantly wrong the first time I wrote this... 

[Eastwind]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

this can always be changed, i mean the updates can change the amount of decimal places at anytime if necessary. also there is still a long way to become a "Global" currency

It is enough for the time being. We can always add more when time comes.

[picolo]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

They can add more if necesserray. If 1 satoshi = 1 cent 1 BTC = 2.1millions $

[adamas]

Bitcoin wasn't designed to be a "global currency".

[poncho32]

21,000,000 * 100,000,000 = 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis

This isn't enough for a global currency.

They can add more if necesserray. If 1 satoshi = 1 cent 1 BTC = 2.1millions $

That's a good point. How long until 1 BTC = $2.1millions ? I don't think a bitcoin will be worth that much for quite a long time.

[maurya78]

This is a non-issue in my opinion
It is well understood that adding decimal places is pretty simple to implement if ever needed

[franky1]

would be 2,100 trillion units (2 quadrillion)

2,100,000,000,000,000

more then enough.... unless you a fan of a one world currency where all 7billion people only have one choice.

i personally see bitcoin as a free choice and not something that should be forced onto the entire population via world wide regulation.

even if 20 million people use bitcoin thats more then some fiat countries population. even if 70million people (0.1% world population) that is still more then the UK's british pound coverage

even if 5% of the world use bitcoin, thats still more than the american population.

bitcoin does not need 100% coverage. just like dollar only has 5% coverage and Yuan has nearly 20%

[R2D221]

Bitcoin wasn't designed to be a "global currency".

I disagree.

[inBitweTrust]

Bitcoin wasn't designed to be a "global currency".

Satoshi disagreed with this:

At first, most users would run network nodes, but as the
network grows beyond a certain point, it would be left more and more to
specialists with server farms of specialized hardware. A server farm would
only need to have one node on the network and the rest of the LAN connects with
that one node.

The bandwidth might not be as prohibitive as you think. A typical transaction
would be about 400 bytes (ECC is nicely compact). Each transaction has to be
broadcast twice, so lets say 1KB per transaction. Visa processed 37 billion
transactions in FY2008, or an average of 100 million transactions per day.
That many transactions would take 100GB of bandwidth, or the size of 12 DVD or
2 HD quality movies, or about $18 worth of bandwidth at current prices.

If the network were to get that big, it would take several years, and by then,
sending 2 HD movies over the Internet would probably not seem like a big deal.

http://satoshi.nakamotoinstitute.org/emails/cryptography/2/

https://bitcoinfoundation.org/forum/index.php?/topic/54-my-first-message-to-satoshi/