Quote from: o_e_l_e_o on Today at 09:25:01 AM

See this post from Ray Dillinger: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=819656.msg9170781#msg9170781

Thank you so much for this link!
So if I understand correctly, 10^8 was chosen for technical considerations, not for user experience. Very interesting!

Quote from: Cryddit on October 12, 2014, 03:28:14 AM

I remember this discussion, actually.

Finney, Satoshi, and I discussed how divisible a Bitcoin ought to be. Satoshi had already more or less decided on a 50-coin per block payout with halving every so often to add up to a 21M coin supply. Finney made the point that people should never need any currency division smaller than a US penny, and then somebody (I forget who) consulted some oracle somewhere like maybe Wikipedia and figured out what the entire world's M1 money supply at that time was.

We debated for a while about which measure of money Bitcoin most closely approximated; but M2, M3, and so on are all for debt-based currencies, so I agreed with Finney that M1 was probably the best measure.

21Million, times 10^8 subdivisions, meant that even if the whole word's money supply were replaced by the 21 million bitcoins the smallest unit (we weren't calling them Satoshis yet) would still be worth a bit less than a penny, so no matter what happened -- even if the entire economy of planet earth were measured in Bitcoin -- it would never inconvenience people by being too large a unit for convenience.

Then

Quote from: Cryddit on October 13, 2014, 05:26:54 PM

Now that I think of it, we did talk about the floating point format in that discussion. 8-decimal divisibility was the maximum Satoshi would consider, for that reason (although he was a fanatic about doing everything with unsigned integers). Hal's point about the smallest division being less than a penny, and that being possible even if the whole world's money supply were denominated in Bitcoin, meant no extraordinary measures were necessary.