Topic: Shift the decimal point over? (Read 16648 times)

Yes but this thread is about changes being made to the official "standard client" (as the OP MoonShadow put it).


Discussion about Bitcoinity and other clients/websites is off topic.

The point is moving to the right, every time a client or website (most of the serious wallets, Bitcoinity...) implements mBTC display option.

1000 mBTC = 1 BTC

Moving the point to the right would make BTC increase its value in people's eyes and would help the general public become more familiar with the currency. It's undeniable that people love integers and hate decimals.

This pool is 3 years old. I'm sure the general opinion now is very different to what it was back then.

This would mean a hard fork in the protocol, something that should be avoided at all cost for a small change like that.

It would be confusing because the value of bitcoin would change 1000-times.

I think this would all become very confusing, with new and old bitcoin. In any case, I'm 100% sure bitcoin will remain bitcoin in the official client, however there is no one stopping anyone from forking it and shifting the decimal 3 places to the right, then the majority will decide.

1 bitcoins has always been and in the minds of the majority always will be 100,000,000 satoshis. If you want another unit you'll have to call it something else - like milibitcoin, which has been in use for a long time and also follows using metric prefixes that the majority of the world knows/uses.

That time is coming my friend.

how much longer can it last with so many decimal places

Out of convience and habit only.  When I can actually buy a loaf of bread with bitcoin at the grocery store, without a series of inconvient additional steps, it will be used muchmore often.

And yet people keep using fiat.

Deflation is about value not supply.  The number of Bitcoins is completely irreverent.
Here is a quote from wikipedia "deflation increases the real value of money"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation
Time and time again we see Bitcoiners talking about economics like they are qualified and have a degree.

Perhaps an example will help you understand:
In Janurary 2013 a loaf of bread cost 1 USD
100 USD would buy you 100 loaves of bread
1 Bitcoin would buy you 13 loaves of bread

In Janurary 2014 a loaf of bread now costs 2 USD
100 USD will buy you 50 loaves of bread (you get less for your money - inflation)
1 Bitcoin will buy you 500 loaves of bread (you get more for you Bitcoin - deflation)

Hope this helps.

Such as? (No really - I'm curious)


Except he wouldn't - barkeep would say "quarter millibitcoin". Message received.

Incidentally, I see what you did there - equating 'two fifty' (presumably $2.50 USD) with 0.00025 XBT - at a time when we are near rough parity of USD:mXBT. Was the deviation from 0.0025 XBT a gotcha? Assuming you meant roughly two and a half bux, barkeep's response would be 'two and a half millibitcions'. Again, clear as day. Or probably just 'two and a half'. If you couldn't assume order of magnitude, it is not the barkeep being dense.

Actually one buys 100 million Bitcoin units for about $1000, so let's just invert the 'description' a little bit without changing anything:

For 1 dollar you get 100 thousand Bitcoin units.

It is the opposite, but Bitcoin is not deflating, it's inflating (at a minimum at a rate of 3600 bitcoins per day). Eventually it might become inflationary-neutral, but for now it's an inflationary currency... which means any day the price of BTC isn't going down, is a day in which BTC value is going up.

Why would it be confusing? The majority of the world uses kilometers/meters/millimeters/micrometers without a problem, but with bitcoins/millibitcoins/microbitcoins it would suddenly be confusing? I will go even further and claim if you ask anyone familiar with metric units that has absolutely no knowledge about bitcoin how many mbtc one btc is they would know.


Looking forward to the news titles like "Bitcoin crashes to 1$" and "Bitcoin company just created 20979 million new bitcoins".

How are you going to mark the coins so you know which BTC is old or new?

You can't. Their is already  over 12 million Bitcoins that have been mined. Move the decimal 3 places and you have a total BTC of 12 Billion. You can't change the rules in the middle of the game. Only 21 million can be mined period. That's why it has to be called a mBTC.   

One of the persistent assumptions on this forum is that it would be desirable for Bitcoin to be adopted by "ordinary folk" (as you put it).  This assertion is fundamentally flawed and has been discussed at length some 4 years ago.  Satoshi Nakamoto has made it clear that the adoption of Bitcoin by the masses at this early stage would likely destroy us.
Quote: Dec. 5, 2010: 'No, don’t “bring it on” (Wikileaks). The project needs to grow gradually so the software can be strengthened along the way. I make this appeal to WikiLeaks not to try to use Bitcoin. Bitcoin is a small beta community in its infancy. You would not stand to get more than pocket change, and the heat you would bring would likely destroy us at this stage.'
It is important to understand that with the roll-out of Bitcoin there is a published schedule, and an unpublished schedule.  These proposals some people are making were discussed as far back as 2008 (that was 6 years ago).  It is simply not possible to publicly discuss critical aspects of Bitcoin, without putting at risk the future of Bitcoin.  Things will happen, when they are meant to happen.  Imagine a scenario where Bitcoin gets adopted by the "ordinary folk", in less than a week you would be hearing in the news that 50 million accounts have been emptied because most people have virus/trojan backdoors installed on their computers.  We have seen examples of this many times in the past, the "Storm" botnet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storm_botnet) is a good example "At its height in September 2007, the Storm botnet was running on anywhere from 1 million to 50 million computer systems".  The mainstream press would have a field day, imagine how they would blame Bitcoin, when really it is because "ordinary folk" are not smart enough to use computers safely yet.  The priorities are security, stability and scalability for now. Functionality and usability can come later.
As for your remark about how "there are 1 or 2 coins out there that are WAAAAY better then Bitcoin".  This was intended to happen by Satoshi Nakamoto, by creating software and then releasing it as open source, and licensed in such a way as to allow others to create new coins, it is part of the plan.  Everything that has happened, has happened for a reason

Its not changing the value of anything its the way Bitcoin's are represented, the other Crypto's look more favorable because instead of collecting 0.0001 coins at a time you can collect 20,000 its just a more tangible way of presenting the volume.

Having thought about this, I don't think it makes sense to change Bitcoin's denomination. That would be like changing the value of the dollar.

Instead, we should begin using mBTC as the standard Bitcoin unit. If mBTC ever hits $1000 then we can switch again to uBTC, and so on down to satoshi.