Topic: Significant Decimal Precision - page 2. (Read 618 times)

Those crazy price predictions will only happen if dollar is affected by a very high inflation. It would not be bitcoin increasing its value, but dollar losing it. At this point, some other pair would be used against BTC, some other fiat or even gold (?)

Millisatoshi (msat), or 0.001 of a satoshi, is already the base unit on the Lightning Network. For one millisatoshi to equal one US cent, then one bitcoin would have to equal one billion dollars, which would give bitcoin (assuming all 21 million had been mined) a marketcap of 21 quadrillion dollars. This is more than global broad money, all the global real estate, all the money globally in stock markets, and all the global derivative markets combined, by a factor of 10. It will be a long, long time before we will need to subdivide further than one millisatoshi.

The question, then, is whether you think Lightning Network will become the main way in which people exchange bitcoin, and how often you think people will be closing channels. Since millisatoshi can't be broadcast to the main chain, if there is an discrepancy when a channel closes, then the value is simply floored to the nearest satoshi. 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.

Lucky Cryddit! ..

I still think extra decimal places are worth it.

What happens when BTC is worth $10 million ?   

A walk down memory lane to a beautiful autumn morning in October 2014.

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 ?

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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 ?