Topic: Solution: How to shift the decimal - page 5. (Read 17610 times)

@NO_SLAVE

Don't assume that you are the high mark of Austrian economic understanding on this forum, nor that you actually understand the underlying economics of Bitcoin.  From what I have seen thus far, neither is likely.  Moving the decimal place is not equivalent to hyperinflation.  In an inflationary state, money is created disproportionately to the economy.  As the central bank creates more money, the existing money loses value.  This is not what we are suggesting here.  In the case of Bitcoin shifting the decimal place, all players have exactly the same relative value as they had before; both in relation to each other and in relation to the non-bitcoin world.  All that divisibilty is already present and accounted for in the system, and the system was designed for it to happen eventually anyway.  The decimal point was placed where it is as an arbitrary design decision by Satoshi, who literally placed the decimal point in the middle of a 16 decimal integer.  The block reward is 50 BTC, but if you look at any block with your own eyes, the system does not use a decimal point at all, and awards the winning miner 5,000,000,000 of the smallest possible unit.  Nothing is changing except how that value variable is displayed by the client, and the client does it because it would otherwise be difficult to read.

phillips,

I understand what your saying, but Im primarily speaking to future scenarios, where hyperinflation might be possible if the number of issued BTC or fractions thereof had no limit or astronomical numbers. If 21,000,000 is the limit and the decimal can slide .000000, that gives us 2.1Xe13 BTC fractions. That is alot of BTC derivative.
The critical question is what number of BTC derivatives creates inflationary scenarios.

Yes the issue now is hyperdeflation of assets against BTC.  There will probably be medicine (a slippery decimal point) my warning is that the solution shouldnt be too strong.  Start with .00, then .000, then .0000 just as a stock split would happen against the USD.  The market will adjust accordingly.

I think what you are missing is that bitcoins are divided and merged when needed. The "problem" is hyperdeflation. This deflation is happening because more and more people are finding out about bitcoin and want to buy some. As BTC becomes a medium of exchange, the stored value of all minted bitcoins will increase.

Your Zimbabwe example is an example of hyper-inflation; the opposite problem.

I fail to see where Keynesian economics comes into this. Do you think the economy can really grow indefinitely? Each bitcoin can be sub-divided to 8 decimal places (I think it is a hard limit). Only about 21 million will ever be produced. Just 1000 1,000,000 bitcoins can probably carry the entire world economy.  (Edit: does 100 Trillion units sound about right?)

Edit: Micro-transactions or isolated economies will likely use their own block-chain, if bitcoin lasts that long.

A good nickname for μBTCs might be "Bits" like a little "Bit" of a Bitcoin.

Yeh, figured you wouldnt understand.  You have little/no knowledge of currency history or the workings of economics, that is what is starting to make me discount the underlying theories of BTC completely. No sound future contingencies or appreciation of the past 5000 years of what happens to fiat currency or the technicalities of its workings.  If you divide up the pie,  yes, there is the same amount of pie. My contention is that the pie can be divided INFINITELY.  Why not just move the decimal .0000000000000000000000?  or maybe
.000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000.
Then there are so many BTC that they devalue based on supply demand curve. Have you not watched whats happening to the dollar?  Read the zimbabwe story, and you will probably start to get it, but my feeling is that you dont want to get it. Keynesians hear no see no speak no evil... Keynesian economics can be controlled by central planners for a certain amount of time.  But eventually it still goes belly up. This currency has no central regulation, other than adding more 0's.  In summary this currency modus operandi ends in complete collapse. 

Meh.

Good first steps but a key will be to make it easier to talk about 'microbitcoins' than 'bitcoins'. Psycholinguistically it helps if the favored unit has a shorter easier to say name. Call the microbitcoins 'micros' or even 'mics'.. and force the original to be a mouthful, like 'original full bitcoins' (OFBTC) or 'protocol identity bitcoin' (PIBTC) or 'network base standard coins' (NBSC). The official term for the full original units has to be long and ugly or it will still dominate thought and discussion. Make 'UBTC' and 'mic' attractive by comparison.

I can't wait to buy a ranch on Mars with a few femto.

Is calling 0.000001 BTC a "microbitcoin" so complicated? Personally, I like the plan up until the "let's drop the 'u' over time."

I disagree, for the same reason as I just posted.

I agree with this.

Maybe the "uBTC" should be called BTC and in the future, the thing we call now a BTC could be a "mBTC" or something.

1 Bitcoin is 1 Bitcoin is 1 BTC. That should never change, ever. That would just cause confusion and force webmasters to fix their sites.

Simply making it an option to display uBTC works best (ideally with a small notification of how many uBTC you have, or BTC, depending on which your preferred unit is).

Just moving the default unit from 1 BTC to 1 uBTC would work best, because it's easy to convert between the two, and there's no need to distinguish between 'old BTC' and 'new BTC'.


EDIT: And the send dialogue could use something like this:



Except without the stuff that doesn't apply to BTC.

And with another row below the "100 Million" with the same number in microbtc.

I'm in favor of keeping the u in uBTC.
We shouldn't be afraid to show how the BTC is now valued more than any other currency (in terms of "numbers").

Also, we all know the max number of BTC is 21 millions. Having to explain how it has been multiplied by a factor of 1000 risks to be difficult.
(Bitcoin is already hard enough to explain...)

lol what? I didn't understand anything of what you said there. You may want to check up on some facts.

What are you talking about? No one is expanding anything. Simply moving the decimal. The current 1 Bitcoin will still be 1 Bitcoin and there won't be any more of them created by moving the decimal. 

Have you ever sliced up a pie? Did you end up with more pie after cutting it? No.

Hm ... ok ... I did have a few 0.02 input transactions. I wouldn't call that a lot, though ;-)


Haven't used the mixer; tried 0.02 BTC but that gave me the same error message. I just rechecked whether 0.3.22 is finally available for Mac. And it is. But - doesn't help with this issue.

Study stock splits.
I'm really surprised that the community has such little background in equities, revaluation of currency or commodity.
There should have been an economist at the core of this development team.
BTC is already trying to pull a quantitative easing 1.  But you have no board, theoretical basis or a bernank to oversee the operation.
so goes anarcho capitalism.

There should be an incremental splitting, first .000, then .0000, then .0000 up to some static limit, say .000000. If there is no absolute limit the BTC will go Zimbabwe and be defunct. The splits should be well notified in advance, say 2-3 months notice, then on a certain day at a certain time all BTC go to .000.  Then in the next X time frame they go to .0000 using the same process.  so forth and so on.

You likely have a lot of small input transactions that the client is attempting to consolidate, as that is it's default profile.  Currently there is not yet a way to tell the client to avoid going over the free size limit, so no matter what you do, you are going to end up paying this oversize limit fee.

Did you mix up a bunch of coins into very small transaction sizes with the mixer, or something?  If not, try sending him .02 BTC; if it will let you do that, then your client is still using the old small value limit schedule and needs to be updated.  The small value limit fee only existed to keep people from 'spamming' the network by repeatedly sending very small amounts to themselves repeatedly.

Sounds like a really good plan to me. I tried to tip you - just 0.01 BTC, which is ... hey ... 10000 uBTC ... but: My client (0.3.21 on Mac) keeps telling me:


No, I don't want to pay a 0.01 fee just to send 0.01 to someone.

Any ideas what's going on here?

I don't see a reason to do the last part of that. μBTC will almost certainly bee needed for people's sanity sake.  However I don't see a reason to do a 1 million to one split on the bitcoin itself.  We have things like pennies today, this would only be slightly different.

Could work. The sensitive part is the switch from BTC to uBTC in the client. Might want a warning popup when you send money that you're sending BTC and not uBTC, at least in the first version.

I like this. Worst case is that people don't lose the 'u' in their notation, which isn't a big deal, really.