Quote from: PhotoFinish on February 10, 2014, 03:03:22 PM

Question - is there any feasible way to simplify a digital currency, in terms of the number of decimal places that it is calculated to?

One of the larger issues that I see regarding the possibility of mainstream adoption of any digital currency is the fact that it's too complex. I don't think the average person wants to keep track of their currency to so many decimal places. "I own 103.01933485 NEM" sounds very complicated. "I own 103.01 NEM" is much more palatable, I think.

Maybe I'm way off - just a newcomer's perspective though.

The position of the decimal point is of course completely arbitrary. One way to counter this issue is to introduce subdivisions (as is currently being discussed here). So, 103.01933485 NEM -> 103019334.85 µNEM (with mabye a nice name for µNEM).

The other way to get rid of too many decimal places is to issue more coins and thus avoiding the need of divisibility.

(The core issue here is that the value of NEM will most likely vary extremely between the initial distribution and later times. DOGE, for example, took the approach of simply producing an extremely huge amount of coins. There are currently 50,000,000,000 DOGE and only 12,000,000 BTC. However, all those Dogecoin are only worth $62,000,000 whereas all Bitcoins are worth $8,000,000,000. So as 1 DOGE is only worth $0.0013, you won't have to deal so much with decimal places there because 1 DOGE already represents a sufficiently small amount of value.)