Quote from: kbriggs on February 11, 2011, 07:13:17 PM

I just become aware of Bitcoin this week watching "Security Now" at Twit.tv. The main question I have about the system is why was 21 million bitcoins selected as the final cap? Why not something more "round" like 100 million or 1 billion? And why such a relatively small number? I understand about the 8 decimal places giving you essentially 2.1 quadrillion tradeable units. But the general public is not used to dealing with more than 2 decimal places in their currency. If the system took off to even the size of PayPal alone, a single bitcoin is going to be worth some huge number and we're all going to be buying things priced at inconvenient amounts like 0.00023, etc., right?

21 million, purely arbitrary.
Also, you don't track units, you track available balances which conceptually allows for indefinite division, there's no such thing as a conceptual atomic bitcoin unit.