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

thanks for all the answers!

it really shed light into some deeper issues I hand't think about

Thinking more carefully, $1 for satoshi is a very high price even in the long term.
As a bullish bitcoiner, I guess we may reach $0.1 for satoshi considering the purchashing power of the dollar today. I say "considering the purchasing power of the dollar today" because all fiat currencies tend to severe devaluation in the long run, which means that $100 in 100 years could be worth less than $5 today.

Anyway, I don't think there would be a need for bitcoin to be more divisible in the next decades.
Moreover, it would be a complete mess to try to make bitcoin more divisible because the software would have to handle past transactions and future transactions differently, introducing a lot of complexity.

Thank you all for the answers. It clarified my doubes

you are aimlessly pretending its a "users fault" if the network changed its unit measure..(THIS TOPIC)
the analogy i made was.. (if you were not ignorant you would understand)
if there was a more then one users using a software because a subnetwork or group demanded a certain software to be used. those rules of that software becomes the rules of that network/community.. which affect more then one users. where you are ignorantly pretending its ok to have malicious code because you pretend only one user would be affected

the point was if BITCOIN changed its units of conversion (the peg) from 100,000,000 to 100,000,000,000 it changes the rules for everyone!!

your silly inept thoughts that the LN analogy of its peg would only affect 1 users. is flawed again because it can and does affect many users and LN has no network security facility(it could but doesnt bother) to prevent such things. . as has the thor turbo flaw(you lot called "feature") affected many users.

you are really trying too hard to break bitcoin(this topic of changing bitcoins unit of measure) and then pretend its no harm that it breaks and then pretend only 1 user would be affected.. you are seriously misleading and very malicious when you try to undermine the security of bitcoin by pretending its of no harm by changing/breaking it

seriously you are ignoring the whole unit measure just to talk about a GUI thing(facepalm)

sorry but actually look at the units of measure at the data level of a raw tx/blockchain utxo value/block coinbase reward and how things would change

EG paying someone in bitcoin of 11 decimals. requires changing the transaction and blockchain rules to allow such unit accounting

now go and do some research and math on it.

and dont respond unless you can understand things like

GUI: 3.12500000
bin:10010101000000101111100100000
hex:12A05F20
dec:312500000

change to:

GUI: 3.12500000000
bin: 100100011000010011100111001010100000000
hex: 48C2739500
dec: 312500000000

where you can try to articulate the many things that break and change due to that change

These flaws affect only the user. Just as any malware (on-chain and off-chain) affects only the user that installs it.

Sure, but this is like saying Bitcoin is a scam, because some people forfeit their ownership to centralized exchanges. People have the freedom to do whatever they want with their money. Some might choose to forfeit their custody to a lightning hub. Some others might just run their own node, and lose no custody.

You went off the deep end this time. You seriously propose we shouldn't have lightning network-- a protocol that is also decentralized, peer-to-peer and self-custody insuring-- just because some people might not use it correctly, contradicting completely the fact that this is already happening in bitcoin, and that it's natural for every protocol.

soft or hard is not how OELEO/doomad pretends its terminology is (he thinks its a Tightening" vs "relaxing" rules thing) (facepalm)

both soft or hard can result in an altcoin creation. it all depends if users want to retain the reject/orphan blocks of a rule change.
both soft or hard can avoid an altcoin creation. it all depends if users want to retain the reject/orphan blocks of a rule change.

soft or hard both can create rejects/orphaned blocks.

both soft and hard are FORKS.. hint is in the name 'soft fork' 'hard fork'

the terminology from 2009-2016 was
a hard fork is a controversial change requiring majority users to upgrade to then support a change/reject out a change thats not wanted
where by a proposed change would need upgrading first to then activate a change when an activation can occur when deemed safe and supported
a soft fork is a change not requiring majority users to upgrade to support.
a hard fork can also present as someone forcing a different block of data that breaks a rule due to a bug in the rules. again requiring a upgrade to make said bug invalid if majority upgrade to invalidate the bugged blocks

in 2017 using (an admitted by core devs) bypass. by rejection before activation. changed the terminology where now certain people think everything is soft and no hards have or will or need to occur

should oeleo/doomad ever dare themselves to do the research on the past they would learn what occurs and know if one happened or not. but it seems by lack of knowledge of past they can only "think" "believe" things happened or not, the way they dream.. because the only insight they have is their dreams

I suppose you could argue that the bug itself was a hard fork, since it allowed the attacker to do something which everyone agreed should be invalid (create 92 billion bitcoin out of thin air). But the successful patch to fix it was a soft fork, as it was simply tightening the rules (by making such overflow incidents invalid). Even BIP50 wasn't really a hard fork, despite often being called such. I don't believe bitcoin has ever had a successful hard fork.

The presence or absence of a chain split does not give an indication as to whether a change was a soft or a hard fork. Although obviously a hard fork could result in a chain split, we could also code a hard fork (such as to fix the 2106 problem) decades in advance which would result in everybody running a compatible client well in advance and there being no chain split.

As an example, I believe block 74,638 back in 2010, well before my time, technically resulted in a hardfork.  There was a serious bug which broke the 21 million BTC limit.  The bug was swiftly patched and everyone switched to the new software version.  That fork would clearly be considered "successful" because it fixed the bug.

//EDIT:  Although I could be mistaken.  Various media outlets describe it as a softfork.  Was there no chain split for that one?

A hard fork does not necessarily imply creation of a new shitcoin, such as in the BCash fork. It is possible to implement a hard fork which the entire network agrees upon, which results in everyone staying on the main chain and no chain split. A hard fork simply means that the rules are being relaxed, and something which was previously invalid is now considered valid.

oh doomad yet again.. you are fooling yourself with your attempts to ignore the obvious

you think these flaws "only affect one user" yet you are foolish to ignore that no one makes an app and gets it put on google play/apple store for just one user.

funny part is..
when thor turbo started its(other flaw) fractional reserve game. many downloaded it and were given msats with no funding utxo. and YOU and your chums called that fractional reserve event of inventing new msats out of nothings as "a feature"

when many users are using mobile apps, where they are stuck using a hub allotting them(giving inbound) value they end up having to use the app the services offers them, where whats not seen on the GUI can affect those users end result they think they are promised. but never get delivered

..
your desires to break the rules of a network structure, and then just say "its the users fault" is your lame scapegoat every time
there needs to be network rules(you dont want there to be network rules) that mitigate the damage
you want a certain app to be able to change rules as they please without anyone able to abstain or veto the devs code. and instead users become just a puppet to a devs code where they also change the network rules to not have a method to prevent a malicious act occurring

again you need to really challenge yourself and realise what consent and abstaining means.
what consensus means..
where by performing an act(ivation) on others, should not occur unless clear consent is given.
your lack of wanting a majority vote or pretending there is not one in the first place is a failure on your part.

oh and if you again pretend bitcoin doesnt have a true consensus then you already debunked yourself in the previous post of other topics when you admit to knowing about the previous versions where you clearly stated you hated the idea of a 6% veto or any veto of a minority.. and then went on to say how you adore that devs can slide in changes without any vote at all due to the non-consent abstaining bypasses put inplace

please go learn what abstaining and non-consent is
learn byzantine generals problem and how consensus actually works
then go learn about what the devs came up with and admitting to performing to bypass consent of the masses
consensus: consent by census(survey of the population )

If someone malicious changed that code, they'd only screw up their own client.  The person receiving funds, assuming they downloaded their client from a legitimate source, would see the real amount being sent or received.  All of your "bugs" seem to involve people downloading malicious code.  That's not the definition of a bug.  That's just malware.  And malware is equally applicable to on-chain clients, so once again, you have failed to present a valid argument against LN.

Every post you make only proves you have no credibility.  You'll say literally anything, no matter how dishonest, to avoid conceding that you have lost.


//EDIT:
And now that franky1's lame and pathetic lies have been decimated, look at how they suddenly change the subject to one of their other equally moronic and flawed interpretations of reality in their next post.  There is no fractional reserve in LN and Thor Turbo channels are funded by BitRefill's own funds.  People can purchase pre-funded channels and this is apparently too complicated a notion for franky1 to comprehend.  See this topic for further details:  https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/is-franky1-making-libellous-statements-about-bitrefill-5226421 

There has never been in the history of bitcoin that a hard fork bitcoin has ever become successful, the ones they did in the early days of bitcoin and the ones they did in the all-time high price of bitcoin to date have not reached the half potential of bitcoin talk more of doing what they are been created for. A hard fork of bitcoin is not necessary nor indispensable, it will make some bitcoin holders if they airdrop it for them but it will mostly enrich some Cartels who will create such fork coins, we have seen it in the past and they didn't it age well. Look at BitcoinCash creator, Craig Wright, he ended up scamming people with his fake Bitcoin only to come back again to say that he is the real Satoshi, a very dishonest person. 

comments in code. is not the code.
read the code

the division and multiplication is a whole different area of math compared to removing significant figures off the end

its funny how you avoided understand the code and just quoted a comment..

some pseudo code for you
remove(right,3)
is different than
/1000

you can do alot more harm with changing /1000 compared to a "round"

Here's a quote from the comments in the very code that you just linked to:

Which is exactly what I said. If you close a channel which is holding some number of millisats, then the transaction broadcast to the main chain will be rounded down to the nearest whole sat. Or here is another quote from BOLT #3:

So no, what I said is very much not wrong.

lets make it simple

A<>B<>C<>D<>E<>F<>G
A wants to pay G 200sat (200,000msat)
onion payment(b:200,005(c:200,004(d:200,003(e:200,002(f:200,001(g:200,000))))))
here people see in the GUI their msat balance destined for their output appears as +200,000
meaning they presume they will get 300sat by computing the input plus payment

               before                                  after                   conversion
       fund            output                 fund         output          rate              broadcast
a-b  a250,000->a250,000           a250,000->a50,000      1000            a250->a50                
       b100,000->b100,000          b100,000->b300,000     1000            b100->b300

b-c  b250,000->b250,000          b250,000->b50,000       1000             b250->b50                
       c100,000->c100,000          c100,000->c300,000      1000             c100->c300

c-d  c250,000->c250,000         c250,000->c50,000         10,000          c250->c5                
       d100,000->d100,000        d100,000->d300,000      10.000          d100->d30
                                                                                                        tx fee:315

d-e  d250,000->d250,000        d250,000->d50,000        1000             d250->d50                
       e100,000->e100,000        e100,000->e300,000      1000             e100->e300

e-f  e250,000->e250,000        e250,000->e50,000         1000             e250->e50                
      f100,000->f100,000         f100,000->f300,000         1000             f100->f300

f-g  f250,000->f250,000        f250,000->f50,000            200              f250->f250              
      g100,000->g100,000      g100,000->g300,000         10,000         g100->g30
                                                                                                         tx fee:70

as you can see at the "onion payment" of GUI display of IOU balance.. everyone feels they are getting fair 200,000msat channel allocation changes in a routed payment.. meaning 200sat payment belief

but end result at broadcast. due to changing the msat conversion rate
is a couple people are not getting paid the end total belief of their input 100sat + payment 200sat
some are getting just 30sat instead of 300sat

which can be even more finely refined to ensure the missing amount doesnt end up as fee. but instead more income for one side than the other

if it was a trim 3significant figures .. the end broadcast results would be different
..

That will never happen, there is LN. One solution for many problems, though it's not decentralized, it's more like visa and paypal but with less fees.

wrong

its not though
READ SOME CODE about the peg

its not a "trim; 5,000,000 msat to 5,000sat"
its a 5,000,000 / 1000 to CONVERT to msat to sat
its a 5,000,000 * 1000 to CONVERT to sat to msat
https://github.com/lightningnetwork/lnd/blob/master/lnwire/msat.go
mathematically there is a big difference. between trimming end units vs multiplication/division
 especially when it comes to the lack of a network protocol.where by people can change the /1000 easily


even the blockstream elements version of lightning highlight this is changable
https://github.com/ElementsProject/lightning-charge#post-invoice

Good question.

So the transactions involving millisats aren't broadcast to the main chain. They remain entirely within the Lightning network. Whenever a Lightning channel which has a balance involving millisats is closed, then the transaction which is broadcast to the main chain is rounded down to the nearest whole satoshi.

Think of it like this. You and I each put ten $1 bills in a jar. There are now twenty $1 bills in that jar. You sell me some goods for $5, and so we agree that when we open the jar again, you'll get fifteen of those bills, and I'll get five. All good so far. Then I sell you some goods for $2.50. So now the balance is $12.50 for you, and $7.50 for me. If we open the jar now, then we can't get the exact amounts we are owed, because there are only $1 bills in the jar and no quarters, dimes, etc., so we can't receive 50 cents each. But no matter, we aren't opening the jar yet, so it doesn't matter for now. We can agree that this is what we are each owed, without actually opening the jar. So we do another trade for $2.80, and now the split is $15.30 and $4.70. And another trade, and another, and another. All the time we agree to split the original $20 in different ways, some of which won't actually be possible because we don't have the coins needed to split up a dollar in to smaller parts. When we finally come to open the jar, let's say (for example) the split is $15.30 and $4.70, as above. You would get $15, and I would get $4, with $1 left over in the jar.

The same thing happens with Lightning channels. You open the channel using a whole number of sats, but then can trade in millisats. As long as your channel stays open (i.e. we don't open the jar), you can trade back and forth in millisats as long as you like. When you want to close the channel (i.e. open the jar), then the transaction broadcast to the main chain will only use sats, and so the balance of both parties will be rounded down to the nearest whole satoshi, with the extra satoshi (the $1 left over in the example above) added to the fee of the closing transaction.

Satoshi Nakamoto really created Bitcoin to handle such a thing as this, so for me, no need for any hard forks.
Since satoshi is the smallest unit of Bitcoin, I can say that is already enough. We just familiarize the conversion of 1 satoshi = BTC, like how many decimals.

If LN is the solution for this kind of issue, I am curious if LN indeed accept a fraction of satoshi while the original network rejects such kind of transaction, how can that transaction be presented on Bitcoin network since I believe LN transactions need to be reflected on the original network?  Please kindly enlighten me since I am really confused about this kind of situation. 

In its current form it would only be part of the solution. There are still other stumbling blocks which would need addressed first.

For example, let's say that a satoshi is worth $1 or more. Are people going to be happy spending hundreds of dollars worth of bitcoin just to open a channel? Or do we need something like channel factories to make it possible to open a channel for a fraction of that cost? More importantly, what about if you have an amount on your channel which is currently considered on-chain dust, but which could be worth hundreds of dollars? Most people won't be happy chalking that up as a loss.

Although it is worth repeating that for a satoshi to be worth $1, then the marketcap of bitcoin would be $2.1 quadrillion, which is more than an order of magnitude more than the global monetary supply. It is a crazy hypothetical.

LN is not the solution.. its too buggy even after 5 years

far easier to start from scratch with a different subnetwork designed differently to LN without the bugs or payment model of LN.. but offers a more secure method of pegging to a 1:1000 unit level to use on the sub network

whilst also reminding people to be risk aware of any sub networks and not pretend a subnetwork of any form is the same as the mainnet

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.

-----

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.

-
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.

-
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.

I don't think there is a need for a hard fork. And I don't think the smallest unit of Bitcoin is the Satoshi. An amount of Bitcoin could actually go smaller than that. The lightning network sometimes even uses millisatoshi or millisat or msat. If Satoshi has 8 decimal points, the millisatoshi has 11 decimal points. So it goes like 0.00000000001. That's 1.7e-7 in USD, way smaller than a cent. So I think there isn't a problem with Bitcoin's divisibility at all even if 1 Bitcoin goes up to a million USD.

Since we have to change the consensus rules for that and it's required that all the nodes accept the new rule, it would be a hard fork.


Any upgrade that is not backward-compatible is a hard fork.
As I already said, for increasing decimal places, we have to change the consensus rules. Nodes are free to not accept the new rules and have a separate chain. So, it would be a hard fork.

I understand that one satoshi is very small and for one satoshi to reach $1 a single Bitcoin should be worth over $100 million, but what if that really happens in 30 years or more? If Bitcoin succeds in the long term, this is plausible.

The bitcoin in the transactions on Bitcoin's timechain (aka blockchain) is in satoshis. If you inspect a block, you will find out that all value transfers are measured in satoshis. Currently, there is no way to own a fraction of a Satoshi. It is not possible to own a fraction of satoshi on Bitcoin layer 1 right now because other nodes of the network will reject any transaction that do not comply with the protocol standards (which is to measure value in satoshis). So, if you try to do some fancy thing to own a fraction of a satoshi, it will be reject by the network participants. It seems to me that if one day we need to own a fraction of a satoshi, this could only be done through a hard fork... this is not something we have to worry for the next years, but could be a problem in some decades. This concerns me

But will that be a hard fork or a soft fork? Just want to be clear about it. I thought anything that does not lead to creation of another coin is just a soft fork, I mean pertaining to this? Or will bitcoin blockchain be abandoned for a new one because of this?

Yes.
For adding more decimal places, we have to change the consensus rules and a hard fork would be required.
According to consensus rules, the amount field in a bitcoin transaction must be an integer between 0 and 2100000000000000 and we can't send 0.1 satoshi or 0.01 satoshi.

One satoshi is a very small unit. If bitcoin is worth $100 million, 1 sat would be just $1. Bitcoin price is $16800 presently, but with all-time-high of $69000. That is not close to $100 million at all.

One satoshi is 0.00000001 BTC, wich means that is already quite small. In any case, the change of that would mean that there need to be consensus with more than 50% of the nodes as far as I know. But there could be other solutions where you could just own parts of a satoshi, like you can now own part of a stock.

Imagine the following scenario (that could possibly occur in decades):

Bitcoin becomes widely adopted, its marketcap surpass the dollar's, and it become so valuable that even a single satoshi is worth more than, for example, a couple of pens, a bottle of water, etc.

In that case, payments for small amounts wouldn't be possible even with second layer solutions such as LN, because even a single satoshi would be more valuable than the price of the product. There would be a need for Bitcoin to be more divisible, for it to be broken down into even smaller parts.

Would such need to use smaller denomination units (smaller than satoshi) require a hard fork? Can someone shed some light into it?