Quote from: herzmeister on April 16, 2014, 10:25:04 AM

nah, merely technical reasons.

The field size to store in a computer's memory an amount of Bitcoin is 16 decimal places. Typical variable size. 8 places before the decimal point (as the maximum amount a transaction can be is 21 million), and 8 places after.

Satoshi merely and probably pretty arbitrarily placed a decimal point in the middle, for convenience, thinking that this will roughly do in the foreseeable time.

Although I agree there was probably a technical reason for the 8 figures of precision, it had nothing to do with "8 places before and 8 places after". Even if we were talking about typical variables, you're probably thinking of, for instance, 8 BITS before and 8 BITS after, not 8 figures in base 10.

The output variable in bitcoin transactions is an 8 Byte variable where each unit represents 1/100,000,000 of a bitcoin.
Thus, the minimum transaction is
(0x0000000000000001 / 100000000) = 0.00000001 BTC (Aka 1 Satoshi)
and the maximum transaction is
(0xFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF / 100000000) = 184,467,440,737 BTC

Why exactly 8 bytes were used when 7 would have been able to create a transaction that still contains more BTC than will ever exist (720,575,940.379 to be exact), I can't be sure. It seems to me like a gigantic waste of a byte in the blockchain for every transaction.

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