Topic: Significant Decimal Precision (Read 618 times)

So, if the base protocol may, given consensus, be upgraded at some point take on the additional decimal places to accommodate settling LN millisats to the blockchain, we'd have the option at that point of extending the halvings as well.

--snip--

So yeah, that's another ~20 years without crossing 21 million BTC and I'm sure if I kept going, it's okay for some time, or possibly forever.

You'll be adding an ever smaller number of Bitcoins per block. There's no point increasing the total Bitcoin supply by - say - 0.00000000000001% per block. The limited supply is by design, and it's one of the things that makes Bitcoin better than fiat.

What about coloured coins ?

You need to colour some BTC, and you need lots of decimal places, to have lots of decimal places on your token.

I hear this mythical date in 2140 when we find the last scrap.. but does it have to be.. if only we could keep halving.. for-EVER!

The M2M economy, as I mentioned earlier, works orders of magnitude lower down the real-time trough. They'll be chatting away hundreds of times a second, querying each other for data etc.. the 'yearly' spend per device will be less than $5.. chopped up millions of times. There are 5 billion Sim/WiFi enabled IoT devices launched a year as of today. Trillions to come. These numbers get really big. 

Can you fork every time, maybe every 20 years.. add 8 decimal places ?

We could reach a point where the vast majority of bitcoin transactions take place on Lightning, with people keeping their channels open pretty much permanently.

What would happen to fees if the minimum amount on-chain was 1 milli-satoshi/byte ?

My use cases for higher decimal precision are required today

My team are working to get IoT devices performing instant Lighting payments in an M2M network of fire sensors, alarm sensors, humidity etc etc.. These devices pay each other as and when they want a reading from any of the other senses. Thousands of sensors thousands of times a day, thousands of locations.

We already need lower than satoshi precision, and the idea of rounding up.. lol.. this is Bitcoin.

That's not necessarily true. When the economy grows, then the value of a fixed/deflationary money supply will grow with it.

For example, 1 BTC is worth about $1 million if Bitcoin replaces all the money in the world, and 1 satoshi is worth about $0.01. But then if the economy grows at about 2% per year for 100 years, then 1 BTC will worth about $10 million in today's dollars, and 1 satoshi is worth $0.10. The price of a Big Mac Extra Value Meal will drop from 399 satoshis to 40 satoshis.

Here it is: Is it time to think about decimal precision ?

[I'd say the Bitcoin transaction fees are much more worrying: As long as the minimum on-chain fee is 1 sat/byte, and users often pay much more than that, I don't worry about fractions of a satoshi. I expect high fees to become a problem long before 1 satoshi becomes too large to be the smallest unit.

Decimal Places.

How many is enough ? Is it ever enough ? (have mentioned this before - can't find the post)

Currently BTC has 8. Clearly not enough. Soon-ish 1 sat will be 1 cent.  Need to be able to chop it up less than that for micro-transactions.   

One solution, add 8 more at the next fork - but I think this is Hard-Fork territory (unless you limit the processing of these higher precision amounts to ONLY segwit) ?

But that may not last forever.. then what - another fork ?

Is there a solution we can fork that works today and always ? A scalable solution to decimal precision ?

------------

Current transaction validity  :
 
1) Make sure the sum of the inputs is greater than or equal to the sum of the outputs.

2) Check Input Script validity.

3) etc..


Make 2 changes.

1) Represent all numbers in their significant digit format to 16 significant digits. NOT as single satoshis, as a floating point number.

2) Make sure all inputs and outputs in any single transaction are in the same overlapping 16 significant digit range.

What does this mean ?

This means you can have a transaction that has milli-satoshis as long as the largest number in the transaction is less than 999 BTC.
You can have billi-satoshis as long as the largest number in the transaction is less than 99 BTC.

But you can go much lower.. you could be using 10^-50 units as long as all the inputs and outputs were in the same sliding scale of magnitude. All the maths is ALWAYS computed to 16 significant digits, it's just the exponent that changes.

Now there is no limit to how many decimal places you can use, BUT you can't mix a million BTC and 1x10^-50 BTC.. You would need to use multiple transactions to group together similar size outputs, until they were large enough to be mixed with larger values, or vice versa when trying to spend smaller amounts.

Issues :

1) Fees  : may have to be handled separately, like CT. The very small BTC units may represent a coloured coin or token, so although individual values may be small the overall value of the transaction may be large.

2) Fungibility : You now cannot mix outputs with values more than 10¹⁶ apart. You can't add a quadrillionth of a satoshi and 1 million BTC  in the same transaction. Can in 2 transactions. Does this matter ?
 

I expect high fees to become a problem long before 1 satoshi becomes too large to be the smallest unit.

(have mentioned this before - can't find the post)

At present, that means losing out on fractions of a cent, but in the hypothetical situation above, you could lose up to $10 on closing a channel.

Then you won't get any change when spending $100 on a cheeseburger, since cents will be a forgotten memory at that point, and nobody will care that Bitcoin can't represent such trifling values.

So there isn't enough USD for bitcoin to reach this value. Usd would need to devaluate through inflation for that to happen (I guess)

Why so pessimistic? There's possibility Bitcoin price going to the moon either because mass adaption or legalization on big country.
By then, people would feel Bitcoin transaction fee is expensive, even though it fees on Bitcoin is unchanged.

https://www.businessinsider.com/heres-how-much-money-there-is-in-the-world-2017-10
Here's how much money there is in the world — and why you've never heard the exact number
According to the CIA, the total amount is $80 trillion if you include "broad money."