Hacker News Reader

Comment by danielmo | Hacker News Reader

A single bitcoin can be split infinitely -- it's just a matter of adjusting the number of decimal points. Currently, a satoshi amounts to a millionth of a Bitcoin. If a Satoshi becomes more valuable, there may be more decimal points added.

View on HN

Is this statement correct? What's the point of a limited number of coins, if they can be split infinitely? That's no different than the government printing money.

Is that so? It sound more analogous to adding a 1/2th penny

By a similar argument, the world's supply of gold is almost infinitely subdivideable, but still finite.

I don't think it's currently correct (there's a base unit, but I don't know if it's that's hard limit or if it can be changed in future versions), but the difference is that when the government prints money, they get the money. The government printing money would be like someone issuing more bitcoins that don't already belong to anyone. Splitting up bitcoins doesn't change the fraction of all bitcoins that each person owns.

Plus, they're already "split up" as it were, it's just they're not valuable enough that people are using nanobitcoins or anything like that. It's only when the value of the currency goes up that people will do transactions in smaller fractions of a bitcoin.

You don't get more pizza when you slice it in smaller pieces.

Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtQa13u6mYM

> satoshi amounts to a millionth of a Bitcoin

One satoshi is one hundred-millionth of a bitcoin, not a millionth of a bitcoin.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com