Is anyone else concerned that the number of Bitcoins in circulation could be an issue?
I'm fully aware of the explanation that it doesn't matter when Bitcoins are lost because they are divisible to 0.00000001, but I'm not convinced that it makes sense to be doing business on that scale.
I see this as a psychological problem. It's hard for most people to really conceptualize value of very small numbers. Yes, people will just be converting to "real" currency to get an idea of what the value is, but shouldn't a successful currency stand on its own? Shouldn't we be able to understand the numbers we're dealing with?
> It's hard for most people to really conceptualize value of very small numbers.
That's why we do all the tricks to workaround the problem of long numbers. We're measuring the length in ~6.68458134 × 10-12 AU, time in 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation, etc. etc. all the time. We just call them 1 meter and 1 second instead. Once a "reasonable amount" of BTC reaches either 1k BTC or 1m BTC, someone will come up with a new, cute and short name for those - I don't think we'll have a problem with small / big numbers here.
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Is anyone else concerned that the number of Bitcoins in circulation could be an issue?
I'm fully aware of the explanation that it doesn't matter when Bitcoins are lost because they are divisible to 0.00000001, but I'm not convinced that it makes sense to be doing business on that scale.
Official explanation here: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Myths#Lost_coins_can_t_be_replace...
I see this as a psychological problem. It's hard for most people to really conceptualize value of very small numbers. Yes, people will just be converting to "real" currency to get an idea of what the value is, but shouldn't a successful currency stand on its own? Shouldn't we be able to understand the numbers we're dealing with?
> It's hard for most people to really conceptualize value of very small numbers.
That's why we do all the tricks to workaround the problem of long numbers. We're measuring the length in ~6.68458134 × 10-12 AU, time in 9,192,631,770 periods of radiation, etc. etc. all the time. We just call them 1 meter and 1 second instead. Once a "reasonable amount" of BTC reaches either 1k BTC or 1m BTC, someone will come up with a new, cute and short name for those - I don't think we'll have a problem with small / big numbers here.
Think about decibel. People talk about decibels all the time, but don't ever talk about bels.
According to Wikipedia, "A decibel is one tenth of a bel, a seldom-used unit."
In other words, people will adjust. Someday, we'll be dealing in millicoins or whatever. And not think twice about it.