Quote from: Dai on March 22, 2011, 09:10:02 PM

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Your thinking is way too rigid here.

Bitcoins can be subdivided to 8 decimal places without any changes except to the client to allow you to use them. The number 1 is just an arbitrary value. Think of it this way.... a common wage used to be in cents per day. Could you imagine being paid even 30 cents per day? There was a time when that wasn't bad money! Hell the US used to mint "mils", which were fractions of a penny!

Think of gold. Its sold in grams right? Well 1 gram of gold is over $300 last I looked (a long time ago). Of course, gold is also divisable. If you only need half that, I can sell you half a gram of gold, you can then spend 1/4 that if you need $75. Makes sense right? All these values are relative, they all float against eachother.

Right now, btc sell for around 70-80 cents each. Clearly 21 million 80 cent pieces, even infinitely divisable ones, are not going to run a whole economy. All that means is that a growing economy should drive up btc values... until they can be subdivided enough to provide enough value to run the economy.

Does it really matter what 1 btc is worth? If 1 btc is worth $100 usd, then, we will trade for $1 values in .01 btc

Nope my thinking is spot on. Unless you fundamentally change the way we use money then just splitting bit coins to be smaller and smaller won't work. They have a name for doing that, it's called deflation. Inflation to much money chasing to few goods and services. Deflation is to little money chasing to many goods and services. You have to create as much currency (what ever it is Dollars, bitcoins) to match the the goods and services on offer that people want. I'm a monetary reformist so I'm not against bit coins or any other community currency but, like I said. You can not use a finite resource as a currency in an exponential system.

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Does it really matter what 1 btc is worth? If 1 btc is worth $100 usd, then, we will trade for $1 values in .01 btc

It only matters if you are talking of bitcoins as being a universal currency. If you are talking about bitcoins as a community currency same as itica hours then no not really.

Let Dr Albert Bartlett explain what an exponential funtion is to you. He does a better job than I ever could.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-QA2rkpBSY
check out all 8 videos.

Maybe I understand this completely wrong but moving the decimal point doesn't change the real value of the coins.
If I have 10 btc and it's worth 10usd and the next day those 10bct become 100btc I still have 10 usd worth. So they're not deflated or inflated.
This isn't creating coins.

If in this example we move the point one digit right the number of coins increases 10x but the value stays the same.
If the current 1btc rises too high it's not going to make sense to trade 100usd for .01 btc so they move the decimal point.

Inflation on the other hand would be creating more coins (which is happening but levels off).