Quote from: becoin on February 28, 2013, 09:17:14 PM

Quote from: JoelKatz on February 28, 2013, 09:02:04 PM

You are arguing that it's better to make people do pointless work to "earn" XRP than give them away for free.

Joel, how did you decide on this number 100 billion XRPs?

We wanted to do XRP calculations internally in a 64-bit unsigned with one bit reserved to signal that it was an XRP amount and one bit free as a sign bit. To avoid having to deal with overflows inside operations and simplify the code, we didn't want to use more than 1/16th of the legal range. For human convenience, we wanted the main unit to be divisible into millionths. That set an upper limit of 2^(64-2) / (16 * 10^6) or 288 billion. 100 billion seemed the most human-friendly number within that range.