Topic: Could the need of Bitcoin being more divisible lead to a hard fork? - page 2. (Read 518 times)

I think the point was that even if $1 is cheaper than a wire transfer, paying in Bitcoin means paying with no decimals.  You go to El Salvador and buy your groceries.  You can not pay 29p for a water bottle because you can only pay 1 Satoshi minimum ($1).  Practically, it becomes a burden.

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Then Layer 2 (Lightning Network) is practically the solution to this fear of Bitcoin's supply or decimals having to be modified.  Right?  There are so many threads talking about the issue but never have I seen this solution suggested or talked about.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

its not just needing a hard fork to add a new tx format that measures in microsats.
you would also need ALOT more code and rules that treat two states of transactions different.

pre-fork dated utxo treated as sats and post fork tx treated microsats.. separating the classes..  and a whole lot of code to ensure the spending of old utxo's dont ever generate more units when being spent or the opposite

Eg a legacy utxo from 2020. of 10units(sats) where by the new tx format doesnt accidentality end up getting 10 units(10 microsats) and instead would need to be a future utxo of 10,000 units(microsats)

where by if the new tx format then wanted to spend its 10,000microsats units to a legacy(8dec) address ensuring that the legacy address validation code does not treat it as 10,000sats when it should be 10 sats

after all we cant really go back and change all blockdata to be 1000x units compared to norm. so there would need to be alot of CLUDGY code. that comes with alot of risks of generating new units outside of the normal coin reward mechanism

in short. we should not even attempt it. as it is not needed anyway

This is simply not correct.

At the protocol level, everything is measured in satoshis. There are no decimal points; only satoshis. You cannot move a decimal point in the protocol because there is not one to move. Coins are defined as 100,000,000 sats. Amounts, outputs, block rewards, fees, everything, is denominated in sats.

If you want to introduce a unit smaller than the satoshi, then it requires a hard fork. A hard fork is a fork which makes things which are currently invalid, valid. If I tried to broadcast a transaction right now spending some fraction of a satoshi, it would be invalid and would be rejected. To makes this invalid transaction valid, we would need a hard fork to introduce smaller units and re-denominate everything in to these smaller units.

As to why the OP believes we have to hard fork the bitcoin project in order to have smaller units, I don't understand the reasoning behind it. When Bitcoin's price rises up when it crosses one million dollars, then it is still appropriate to use a satoshi as a unit of measurement when talking about bitcoin amounts, and it is important to note that doing a hard fork does not have anything to do with having other bitcoin measuring units because it is simply about placing decimal places rather than doing a hard fork.

learn some code and data structures
there are no decimals in code/data. its all smallest unit of sats
btc and decimals exist as human visual aids. not as base code/data of bitcoin function

to break the smallest unit into 1000x sub units. breaks the whole accounting system of bitcoin.
it would break many rules of supply, require changing how many halvenings occur, changing how many shareable units will ever be created.. a huge mess and tragedy to the supposed claims of certain rules that should not be touched

Bitcoin is already divisible to 8 units, and that's more than enough for the world's population. 1 satoshi would cost around $1 when BTC hits the millions, anyways. That's still cheap when you compare it to a wire transfer or even credit/debit card fees. We don't need to worry about this, especially when it's going to take decades before BTC goes well above $1m per coin.

If there's ever a need to make BTC more divisible, it will come to a consensus among developers, miners, and node operators alike. A hard fork would likely happen by that time, but it won't be as controversial as the big blocks debate by Bitcoin Cash proponents. Everything will go smoothly without issues (at least that's what I hope for). Who knows what would be of Bitcoin in the future? Just my thoughts

From my understanding I believe that bitcoin will be generally accepted if it stunned is beerus season or bearish market the world will adopt it as a method off payments all world currency because when looking at it right now many people is now adopting use of cryptocurrency so that is not country who is not making use of autocorrect now I have not heard of Bitcoin

Hi Brother I think that's not possible because after 100 years i think that BTC price might be some million Dollars but at that time there might be some Changes in Transaction fee and other such things like Btc Fee might be Zoro and other such things that People may not use Bitcoin as payment method than other coins cause they might offer something that could be more favourable. So let's see that What can happen.

The denomination to send bitcoins can be changed through consensus and community can support it in future if bitcoin value becomes too high. What a damnnhigh price $100M for bitcoin. We are too far and not too closely to that price.

However I believe that community will never support a consensus to increase total supply of Bitcoin. Because at beginning and at the end, 21M in total supply is what help Bitcoin has high value and potentiality to keep up its high value.

I wouldn't try to preempt the decision at this stage.  We have no idea what the landscape will look like when we reach a time when some might consider such a change to be important.  It's also worth pointing out that, at some point within the next ~80 years, Bitcoin does require a hardfork to fix a fatal bug.  So let's not have too much fear-mongering about the supposed dangers of hardforks when there's no chance of completely avoiding them.  People may well view it as an opportunity to make other changes.

Ultimately, the network will collectively act in its own interests and individuals will have to decide if they still want to follow or not.

Public Notice: This topic contains a post by user franky1, who has stated that there are nodes currently running on the Bitcoin network which do not follow consensus.  This is an impossibility from a technical standpoint.  They are in no position to make judgments on technical matters.  Along with derailing topics to discuss unrelated matters and generally being a disruptive nuisance, this vile user has also equated softforks to an act of rape, which is deplorable and unconscionable behaviour.  Consider adding them to your ignore list.

This is much less of an issue. Although a satoshi is the base unit in the protocol (meaning introducing smaller units would require a hard fork), this is not the case for fees. Although we all think in terms of sats/vbyte for fees, in the protocol fees are actually define in terms of sats per virtual kilobyte, or kvb. The default setting is 1000 sats/kvb, which is obviously the same as 1 sat/vbyte. Because of this, if is easy to change that to 100 sats/kvb (for example), which would be the same as 0.1 sats/vbyte (which would obviously then be rounded up to the nearest sat). Indeed, not only do we not need to fork for this, but we don't even need an update to Core at all. Any node is free to change their minimum fee rate at any time, and miners are free to include any transaction paying any fee they like at any time.

You can already do this with Lightning. You can open a channel and make transactions involving millisats for as long as your channel remains open. If you close a channel which is holding some fraction of a satoshi, then the balance you receive will be floored to the nearest satoshi.

So for example I open a channel with 100,000,000 msats (100,000 sats). I transact back and forth over several months. At the end of those months my channel has a balance of 100,045,724 msats. If I close the channel, I'll receive 100,045 sats.

it's better not to change bitcoin, because if you change it, especially if there are satoshi or bitcoin children, it will definitely change the bitcoin system.
why should it be reproduced, things like that are not needed in bitcoin, because the results will be the same.
if you think bitcoin has children, so it can be affordable and cheaper, it is the same thing, buy bitcoin within your financial means.

Hope this is not a stupid idea, but.

Say the scenario of Bitcoin uprising to $100,000,000 somehow turns into reality.  Is it possible to create a second layer on top of Bitcoin or a third layer on top of the second to allow payments under 1 satoshi and only return to layer 2 or 1 if you own exact amounts of Satoshi's with no decimals?

So if I have 100 Satoshi's and I give you 0.1 through this third layer, I have 99.9 left.  Now I can only go back to layer one with 99 Satoshi's and will need 0.1 more if I want to send the remaining.  Bitcoin continues to have only 8 decimals but this layer allows micro payments.  Something like how faucet payments work.  You accumulate enough until you can 'withdraw' part of it to a previous layer.

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Regards,
PrivacyG

I think this is what will happen. There were several discussions of this in the forum about this to which we know they planned it ahead already before this adoption could take BTC to $1M. And it will be possible to pay for a water bottle using an LN wallet in stores like Starbucks.

It wouldn't need hard forking anymore I suppose. Every company I think will also adopt LN as well after all everyone wants tiny bits for thier fee.

Another problem that would arise if bitcoin becomes so valuable that one satoshi is one USD is that transaction costs would make it impossible to spend the bitcoins. Right now, even a one satoshi transaction would require a few hundreds or thousand satoshi in transaction fees.

Here's a post from Ray Dillinger on this topic which you might find interesting: https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.9170781

Even in such a case where bitcoin becomes a globally adopted currency, a satoshi is probably still going to be just fine as the smallest on-chain unit. The bigger issue would be dealing with fees and the dust limit for transactions which are only moving a few sats. No point paying 100 sats to move 1.

That's where second layer solutions come in to play. No one is going to pay 100 sats to move 1, but would likely have no problems spending 100 sats to open a channel which could move 1 sat over and over again, thousands or even tens of thousands of times.

You can code your own wallet software to display any units you like. I could code my wallet so instead of displaying 8 decimal places it displays 20. Instead of sats being the base unit, now my base unit is picosats. None of that makes any difference to the protocol though, and the smallest amount I could work in would be 1,000,000,000,000 picosats, which is equivalent to 1 sat. Trying to change any of the 12 zeroes in that number would simply result in an invalid transaction which would be rejected by the network.

raw data of blockchain and transactions do not measure things in whole bitcoin nor bitcoin plus decimals

its measure is actually infact at the satoshi level. yes satoshis are the base and true units.
bitcoins are an affect effect visual display calculation

changing amount of visual display calculation (decimals) breaks the value measure completely

yes in 2009 it was not 50 coins mined
it was 5,000,000,000 units mined
and thats hard coded into the protocol and block data

the term btc is a basket allotment of sats divided by 100,000,000
where btc exists not as hard data or protocol. but as user interface easy view display

this means in the reality of actual data and rule
it was 210,000 blocks of 5,000,000,000 units mined
then   210,000 blocks of 2,500,000,000 units mined
and so on



if we stupidly change the decimals of easy view display at GUI level . it does require breaking the blockchain and data store rules

and by doing so can easily cause miscount or mis-conversion bugs of creating more value than should exist, and/or the opposite

EG
if there was a 11 decimal system in bitcoin to bastardise bitcoin to look like a stupid subnetwork of flaws..
it would require making block rewards of 2009 change from being 50coin to being 0.05coin

yep changing the calculation from 100,000,000 to 100,000,000,000
makes
5,000,000,000 appear as
0.05,000,000,000

lets not bastardise bitcoins strongest rules just to emulates some flawed buggy network created in 2017 that has not blockchain or consensus or network security of its own

if that network has a bug where its peg of 1:1000 can be broke easily.. thats their problem. lets not break bitcoin to fix their problems

You are right. As we all know, each bitcoin is divided to 100 million units and there are 8 decimal places for bitcoin. You can send 0.001 BTC and your wallet or block explorers can show that as 0.001 BTC, 1 milliBTC or 1000 microBTC. But in the bitcoin protocol, there are no decimal places and we always deal with satoshis.

Although Bitcoin does not support micro-payments, but I read in this presentation [1] it found there's a way to send micro payments using lightning network with probabilistic payments method (start read on the slide 15).

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[1] https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1G4xchDGcO37DJ2lPC_XYyZIUkJc2khnLrCaZXgvDN0U/edit?pref=2&pli=1#slide=id.g85f425098_0_2

Correct me if I'm wrong — but couldn't this simply be done in the wallet side of things? As it's mostly just moving of decimal places anyway.