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Topic: A flaw in bitcoin, if it became widely adopted 21m bitcoins, 7b people on planet (Read 3252 times)

legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1137
it will all come down to how many people are going to be using bitcoin in the end (7 billion or just a couple million) and also bitcoin price.
and both of these two have a hand in hand relationship. higher price will make more people use it and more people using it will lead to higher prices.
and high price means 1 satoshi is worth something, and as it was pointed out earlier there is 8 decimals after bitcoin.
newbie
Activity: 28
Merit: 0
There are also other CC, that would add value
hero member
Activity: 574
Merit: 500
Why does everyone need a whole Bitcoin?

Because you cannot do much with less than $400 and people need to do lots of things in their day-to-day activities.

sr. member
Activity: 350
Merit: 250
Why does everyone need a whole Bitcoin?

Because you cannot do much with less than $400 and people need to do lots of things in their day-to-day activities.
legendary
Activity: 966
Merit: 1006
In the near future when bitcoins will be widely and globally accepted and adopted by every single people around the world. even 1 satoshi will have its value. cant for the time that 1 satoshi can get me a cone of ice cream, well im hoping i will live long enough to witness it.

If the bitcoin price is $1m, 1 Satoshi is worth about a cent. We need the bitcoin price to be $100 million for a satoshi to buy a cone of ice cream.
hero member
Activity: 1316
Merit: 514
In the near future when bitcoins will be widely and globally accepted and adopted by every single people around the world. even 1 satoshi will have its value. cant for the time that 1 satoshi can get me a cone of ice cream, well im hoping i will live long enough to witness it.
legendary
Activity: 2282
Merit: 1023
Some currencies are worth more than others. Just like the 1 Iranian Rial only worth about 0.08 bit, while 1 British Pound worth about 3,400 bits.
sr. member
Activity: 504
Merit: 251
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Like most people said why the need for a whole bitcoin when fractions of one can be used no different
legendary
Activity: 3066
Merit: 1047
Your country may be your worst enemy
This isn't a problem at all. BTC is just like everything else. Some people own 10 houses, but millions are homeless. Jay Leno owns more than 100 cars, while millions don't have any. This is the world we live in. BTC will change how we handle money, but it won't change the world.
sr. member
Activity: 242
Merit: 250
You do know that not everyone is going to own 1 whole Bitcoin. You can own parts of Bitcoin as well. Maybe you didn't know that.
legendary
Activity: 3556
Merit: 9709
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There are a maximum of 2,099,999,997,690,000 Bitcoin elements (called satoshis), which are currently most commonly measured in units of 100,000,000 known as BTC.

I think there are plenty of units to go around.

^^^^

/thread
sr. member
Activity: 392
Merit: 250
Not everyone will be able to have 1 bitcoin. Even these days just 1 bitcoin is a goal for many, and its difficult to achieve with current prices.
newbie
Activity: 11
Merit: 0
A quick calculation shows that if in 2140 all the btc is mined and the population sticks to the current 7bil then everyone on the planet would need 0.003btc for them to e evenly distributed; of course some people will have none and some will hold many and some will have a few, just enough to be considered wealthy.

I have 0.1btc right now and intend to get more, so I guess that would put me in the 1% in 2140?

Of course then you also have the lower value coins that people will have accrued including Dogecoin that apparently has no limits so there will likely be trillions of those floating around the internet and stuffed on antique quantum computers... Smiley
legendary
Activity: 966
Merit: 1006
you are getting the wrong idea dude, make bitcoin popular does not mean that everyone has to own a bitcoin. it means that everyone must know about bitcoin and if some problem occurs to them regarding transactions then they know about a reliable source such as bitcoin. the goal of the developer of bitcoin might not have been to remove bitcoin but to spread bitcoin as gold, gold is also limited but many people who can afford gold have gold in some form and even the elder illiterates know about gold. i might be wrong but this is what I thing bitcoin was invented for.

That is the point. Many people do not own gold, but they know what the gold is. When crisis hit, they can buy gold.
member
Activity: 86
Merit: 10
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you are getting the wrong idea dude, make bitcoin popular does not mean that everyone has to own a bitcoin. it means that everyone must know about bitcoin and if some problem occurs to them regarding transactions then they know about a reliable source such as bitcoin. the goal of the developer of bitcoin might not have been to remove bitcoin but to spread bitcoin as gold, gold is also limited but many people who can afford gold have gold in some form and even the elder illiterates know about gold. i might be wrong but this is what I thing bitcoin was invented for.
legendary
Activity: 1946
Merit: 1007
Even if there were enough bitcoins around to hand everybody 1 bitcoin, that would not be how bitcoins would be distributed. Some people will be accumulating just like with fiat, while others end up holding nothing.

It's human nature that some people find a way to gain a lot of something, while others find a way to get rid of everything. We should accept that this can never be changed.
legendary
Activity: 994
Merit: 1035
Actually the fact that all bitcoins fit within 2**53 is quite a happy accident. It means that integer-satoshi amounts can be represented exactly by the IEEE decimal64 type, which provides one route towards practically infinite divisibility by using exact arbitrary-precision rational arithmetic and decimal64 for serialization.

Freicoin already implements arbitrary-precision internal arithmetic, and decimal64 support could be added by a new transaction serialization version. As others have mentioned though, there's not really a need until sub-satoshi amounts have any real-world value.
donator
Activity: 1617
Merit: 1012
If it later feels like its too less.. its no problem at all to split satoshis into 0.1 and 0.01 more..

This would require a hard fork. Also if 1 satoshi would be worth something significant we might also consider changing mining schedule to go beyond 2140 - that is make the block reward keep halving into fractional satoshis. This would effect how the last few satoshis are mined, but would have no significant impact on the ~21 million total BTC.

Are you sure it would need a fork? I would think that all it would need would be that everyone update his Bitcoin client.

Smiley
I'm not a technical person. However, if the denominations start to go below satoshi, the new client would implement this and if miners mine the blocks with transactions below satoshi, it would create a fork. The newer clients will agree and the older client would disagree. This would create a fork.
The only real problem is that with miner fees.
If we have mass adoption, rise in price, what will happen to the fees and output priority?
The relay fees would probably decrease. The transaction fee the miners want to accept is totally up to them. I would imagine that the transaction priority relaying limit would decrease and the block size would increase in the near future. The blocks can then have more free transactions.

Changes in the client would be small.


The miners would be the first ones to upgrade their clients, because they are on the cutting edge, so to speak.

People who didn't upgrade simply wouldn't have their wallets updated when they received transactions smaller than their clients could handle... at least until the combined amounts for any single address reached 1 satoshi or more. And they wouldn't be able to send smaller amounts than 1 satoshi.

The latest Bitcoin core clients look for the best chain. They would still do this, even if they couldn't update the blocks with fractions of a satoshi. Why? Because the miners would still be using updated clients that would be indicating the best chain.

I, like you, can see that there might be problems. They should be able to be solved. If in the future, when miners were down to mining only 2 or 3 bitcoins per block, or if the whole block size process is going to be changed like Gavin wants, by then everyone will be using an updated client. Are there people who still use version 0.2.0 (we are a 0.11.2 right now)?

Smiley

Please explain how you can accomplish this with just small changes to the client when you need to redefine the representation of the value field of the TxOut data structure.

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Transaction#general_format_.28inside_a_block.29_of_each_input_of_a_transaction_-_Txin

Currently value is a 32-bit field and the smallest bit represents 1 Satoshi. If you add more bits to this field or modify it in any other way (to create a high resolution value with sub-Satoshi precision) you will change entire fabric of the Bitcoin network. If this is done in an uncoordinated way nodes/clients that only recognize the old 32-bit value would reject the new high resolution value.
full member
Activity: 210
Merit: 100
BTC > etc
As most has said, it is not an issue
several places already show values in mBtc and as the price goes up, soon enough we will be calculating in satoshis as opposed to full BTCs

Think of commodities, aluminium is priced in tons but gold is priced in grams
legendary
Activity: 1750
Merit: 1115
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When I started with bitcoins I used to think the same but never thought of asking anyone since it would make look stupid.But after searching for a while on google,I'm convinced there is no limit as to the number of bitcoins available right now are sufficient to give everybody few satohsi's.Also not everybody needs 1 btc.
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