It's presumably only temporary measure, and only present in the reference client.
Anything below four decimal places is completely worthless at this point anyway; do you really have a use for being able to send 0.01c USD?
Anything below four decimal places is completely worthless at this point anyway; do you really have a use for being able to send 0.01c USD?
A handful of developers shouldn't be deciding acceptable business models for bitcoin. That's not going to lead anywhere good.
Why should it take hours for my Bitcoin client to sync (and therefore for me to do anything with my Bitcoins) because people want to encode URLs in the blockchain?
In a few years, it could take days to sync a new client. What kind of banking system would that be?
Even if payment processing costs weren't an issue (which would cause many more small unbatched transactions in gov currency, similar to the crap being dumped into the block chain... banks have to log gov currency transactions for auditing purposes), whatever the cost of individual transactions, if you have a payor who owes you $.001 over a billing period, you've done something wrong. They'd be just as willing to pay you $.01 as $.001.
Is that now the guiding principle for Bitcoin?
Is this sarcasm?
0.01US$ might be worth nothing in the US, but might be worth something in some poorer countries.
There are a number of effective "we're gonna change the world" platforms in the bitcoin world.
1) No centralized bank or government control of value/transactions/etc. 2) Anonymous wealth control 3) Microtransactions 4) Non-repudiable 'instant' transactions
These are not exclusive, nor a complete list. For example, I'm very much a fan of #3 and #4 because I have been hoping for years that we can create a sustainable system for implementing many of the commercial aspects, including transclusion, of the Xanadu goals.
All of us are ignorant or dismissive of some basic facts, whether technical, political, or economical. For example, people are very fascinated with identifying the high-net-worth btc holders. While the effort to track their accounts and transfers was originally non-trivial, people spent a lot of time developing tools and methods for correlating accumulation and distribution. It's a short hop from there to tying an account to human entities.
It's not that this was unforeseeable, but that the effort seemed too much to worry about. However, one should probably assume that any effort distributed across the Internet will attract the attention of those people who have the time and inclination to grind away at tasks considered to be pointless by the vast majority. For some, it's a way of counting coup, and you'll never escape that.
The 'opportunity' that the limitation on transaction size creates is a value-added service for micropayments. In effect, a merchant would keep a ledger of microtransactions that could be remitted at any time. You could do this today with Mt. Gox, for example.
The downside of this is much the same as with a conventional financial system. That is, people are morons and principles have a price. Many of the systems built to date have been compromised (Mt. Gox, Bitcoinica, etc.) or misappropriated completely (BTCST, Bitcoinica, etc.). It is unlikely (but possible) that an entity with technical and legal competence and a scrupled imperative will bridge the gap for microtransactions on a long-term basis.
If it were to happen, one would still have a centralized 'bank' that would have to follow practices that would compromise anonymity due to AML and KYC regulations because bitcoin services are not a competitive market at this time.
Placing the constraint right on the edge of the current value seems like it will just cause a lot of problems as the value continues to fluctuate.
I'd also point out that in much of the world, the local equivalent of $0.01 USD may actually not be a trivially dismissable amount of money.
But I'm not sure it's a bad idea, I just think they chose a very awkward value to peg it at.