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Showing 11 of 11 results by Christophe_dcy
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 18/08/2023, 08:54:06 UTC
When bitcoin was first launched, the client only showed two decimal places, not 8. Many users at the time did not know it was further subdivisible.

Here's another post from satoshi which might interest you: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44.msg267#msg267

Thank you so much for your research! I find it really respectable that you went digging and came across a statement by Satoshi!

Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge.

But don't worry, there are another 6 decimal places that aren't shown, for a total of 8 decimal places internally.  It shows 1.00 but internally it's 1.00000000.  If there's massive deflation in the future, the software could show more decimal places.

If it gets tiresome working with small numbers, we could change where the display shows the decimal point.  Same amount of money, just different convention for where the ","'s and "."'s go.  e.g. moving the decimal place 3 places would mean if you had 1.00000 before, now it shows it as 1,000.00.

So it was Satoshi's original intention to use a currency with 2 decimal digits (like all other currencies).

But above all, he explains very well that the larger the money supply, the greater the need to shift the main unit by 3 digits.
Finally, 13 years after his post, the main unit would have to be shifted by 6 digits.

In fact, it doesn't matter how this unit will be called (bit, nakamoto or whatever), what's important is to respect the original idea and adapt to reality so that using Bitcoin is as simple as possible for the general public.

And yes, of course, technicians like you, the original enthusiasts, would continue to speak with satoshis (that's what I suggested in my diagram, the satoshi is for technical purposes: https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/08/17/MAJM1.jpeg).
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 17/08/2023, 10:45:20 UTC
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!

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

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.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 17/08/2023, 09:03:36 UTC
Thank you very much for your comments.
I realize that a small diagram would have been welcome from the start, my apologies.

When I talk about mass adoption, I also mean business accounting, for small shops and so on.
Keeping dual accounts (in MXN and USD, for example) is not easy enough. If, on top of that, you add a currency whose subdivisions have nothing in common with existing currencies, nobody's going to understand it. And it will piss everyone off to deal with satoshis.

Also, I haven't found any answers, but does anyone know why Satoshi Nakamoto decided 1 btc = 10^8 sat? Why 8?

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/08/17/MAzy8.jpeg
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 17/08/2023, 08:52:04 UTC
Thank you very much for your comments.
I realize that a small diagram would have been welcome from the start, my apologies.

When I talk about mass adoption, I also mean business accounting, for small shops and so on.
Keeping dual accounts (in MXN and USD, for example) is not easy enough. If, on top of that, you add a currency whose subdivisions have nothing in common with existing currencies, nobody's going to understand it. And it will piss everyone off to deal with satoshis.

https://www.talkimg.com/images/2023/08/17/MAzy8.jpeg
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 16/08/2023, 20:23:43 UTC
How can renaming Bitcoin to something else...
This is just like telling the United States to change their currency from dollar to a fresh new thing entirely...

Did you actually read the article? I guess not...
If the paper isn't educational enough, I'm sorry. But what you're saying has nothing to do with the underlying thought...
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 16/08/2023, 18:27:44 UTC
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Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin Unit Logo System
by
Christophe_dcy
on 16/08/2023, 15:04:15 UTC
I think there's a lot of confusion about these logos.
The Bitcoin logo is the logo for the Bitcoin protocol, not the logo for the bitcoin unit.
There's no need for a logo for a currency unit...
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 16/08/2023, 14:58:09 UTC
Isn't it technically "Bite" rather than "Bit"?
you're right, it's the word "bite", not "bit", but the 2 are pronounced the same  Smiley

We already have BTC and sats which most people use.
don't forget that I'm talking about the masses, not insiders.  Roll Eyes


In fact, it doesn't matter how we call the unit that defines 100 satoshis. My point is that it's this basic unit that should be used.

Talking in bitcoin is the equivalent of talking in millions of dollars: it's of little interest, unless you're talking about very big amounts.
Talking in satoshis is the equivalent of talking in cents: big numbers for nothing.

An intermediate unit is more interesting to use in everyday life.
If you're going to use an intermediate unit, you might as well use the one for which 1 Unit = 100 sat, and 1 million Unit = 1 btc.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 15/08/2023, 19:34:52 UTC
Nakamoto sounds decent because we have Satoshis, but the shortcut "naks" sounds awful. But I don't like "bits" either as "bits" is already a common word that could mean either something like "smaller bits" or  "bits" as in with relation to memory.

you're right, the word bit is already used in electronics or for memory.

I'd just like to make one important point. In French, bit means cock. Which means that the French-speaking world will never be able to use this word to talk about a currency.

With the development of Africa, some studies show that by 2050, French will be more widely spoken than English in the world.

Bitcoin is a universal system, we need to find another word for 100 sat  Smiley
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Proposal for mass adoption: the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 15/08/2023, 19:16:59 UTC
I noticed it is a newbie account making this proposals and I think the face behind this proposals is not a newbie as we think it to be because a newbie can barely come up with such proposals at such early stage for a change or inclusions but I am still curious about it.

OP your proposal is quite alright but I think it would require much deliberation from the community and to be frank reaching a resolve would definitely take time as I see this as it looks unrealistic and unnecessary.

yes, I'm not exactly a newbie :-)

If there's a debate between sat and bit, it's obvious, according to this paper, that we should go for bit. Talking in sat is strictly pointless in view of the arguments deployed in the article.

Maybe Nakamoto isn't a good idea, and we need to find another one. But the term "bit" doesn't stand out enough from "bitcoin". We need to find something different, and above all, use it.
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Board Bitcoin Discussion
Topic OP
Article: Proposal for the introduction of a new unit of account
by
Christophe_dcy
on 15/08/2023, 17:09:38 UTC