Topic: Eight decimal places isn't enough... (Read 8989 times)
keep hearing people say that since bitcoins are divisible down to the eighth decimal place, we can afford losing bitcoins since the rest will grow in value.
Bitcoins are divisible to 0.00000001. don't worry about the scalability. It's a temporary thing.
Just remember "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" and that goes for adding decimal places if needed.
I think everyone would love to have the problem of further divisibility, but it seems like quite a ways off.
I think everyone would love to have the problem of further divisibility, but it seems like quite a ways off.
people seem to be fixated on the negative and like spreading fear or something. How is this issue a huge problem? I agree it could be an issue but that is something that has been addressed in the past.
adding another 8 decimals would probally be trivial
This is not going to be an issue for a very very long time, and can be adjusted if need be in the future.
Same old misunderstandings again and again. Kind of get old when people insist any flaw they think they see is the end of BTC.
We can use tonal bitcoin wallets when needed.
As long as one satoshi is less than a penny, then I think 8 decimal places is fine.
Btc with all its flows still is great base for future altcoins. I'm even sure we can't just upgrade bitcoin at this stage.
We are not gonna need more Than eight for a long time yet
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To make matters worse, if a truly rich person (in bitcoins) dies and leaves no will or whatever, we could end up losing tens of thousands of bitcoins over time equating to billions of unique transactions.
That means all the community possesing BTC´s would get the wealth of this man automatically distributed.
Would be the good time to kill whales for profit´s sake. Can´t think in a higher level of poetic democratia.
If the eight places are for two places of cents and the remaining six for millions...
Sorry for resurrecting the dead, I just thought that this comment was incredibly insightful and apt - considering the range of current estimates for world M1 (in USD). Scarcity is relative.Yes. We will run out of decimal places much sooner than previously thought. You don't want to be late to this party, or you will end up with a permanent legacy workaround like ipv4 vs ipv6.
Scarcity may be the most powerful social force of all. Lets not let bitcoin run short on scarcity. We don't want to face a peak scarcity situation.
If the eight places are for two places of cents and the remaining six for millions...
Sorry for resurrecting the dead, I just thought that this comment was incredibly insightful and apt - considering the range of current estimates for world M1 (in USD). Scarcity is relative.
If eight decimal places is not enough - everybody with 1BTC will be a millionaire someday when non-BTC currency inflation escalated the price of BTC to that level. If the eight places are for two places of cents and the remaining six for millions...
When one of the smallest current bitcoin units is worth many dollars that will be great as it will create more use for less valuable sister-currencies that can serve as "small change".
-MarkM-
-MarkM-
That's 21 trillion dollars. Double the size of the US economy.
And not all of the economy is in dollars. Due to velocity of money, you don't need 21 trillion dollars floating around to do that.
We got plenty of digits for a LONG time.
M2 money supply in the USA is currently $9 trillion. I'm not going to worry about all the problems Bitcoin will have when it is more than double the US dollar money supply.
Eight decimal places is ridiculously overoptimistic. It is a not a problem. Period.
First, we can change from 64 bit to 128 bit at any time. My guess is that we will do it for technical reasons LONG before economic reasons show up.
Second, there is rampant confusion between "bitcoin" the name of account for a single unit of this currency and "bitcoin" the thing that lives in your wallet (and can be lost with your wallet) that gives a claim on some arbitrary amount of bitcoin (in the first sense) units. A lost wallet can lose a bitcoin (in the second sense) with an arbitrary value denoted in bitcoins (in the first sense).
Third, essentially no one cares beyond 0.01 btc (first sense). Maybe we should reconsider this in AD 2215 when the minimum (current) resolvable amount is something that people actually care about.
Second, there is rampant confusion between "bitcoin" the name of account for a single unit of this currency and "bitcoin" the thing that lives in your wallet (and can be lost with your wallet) that gives a claim on some arbitrary amount of bitcoin (in the first sense) units. A lost wallet can lose a bitcoin (in the second sense) with an arbitrary value denoted in bitcoins (in the first sense).
Third, essentially no one cares beyond 0.01 btc (first sense). Maybe we should reconsider this in AD 2215 when the minimum (current) resolvable amount is something that people actually care about.
The current software only allows division up to 8 decimal places. That's not a hard limit.
Even if it weren't, it would be possible for systems to be set up which would distribute shares of the smallest divisible value. It would be a problem, but not a hard one to solve - especially considering how widely it would already have to be used and accepted before we ever got to that point.
It's like cents - you can't possibly sell a chocolate for less than a cent.
No, but you can sell more that one piece of chocolate for a cent, or a bigger piece. Hershey's made a five-cent chocolate bar for almost fifty years, and the bar's weight fluctuated with the price of chocolate: http://www.foodtimeline.org/foodfaq5.html#candybar
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