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Actually it is limited to units. You can still divide a Bitcoin into satoshis, and these satoshis are limited in their printing. He used 21 million units of Bit

Actually it is limited to units. You can still divide a Bitcoin into satoshis, and these satoshis are limited in their printing. He used 21 million units of Bitcoin, but since you want to get technical, it's actually 21,000,000,000,000,000 satoshi. I don't know what possible source gave you the idea that divisibility == unlimited, but sadly, it's wrong. Also, please take your "digital gold" meme and use it on r/Bitcoin. Not only does Bitcoin's price contain the speculative valuation of a million people who call it a currency (regardless of your particular vision) but that vision also has a million flaws. It's rather funny, when someone points out its flaws as "digital gold" then the Bitcoin troglodites come out and call it a currency. When you point out its flaws as a currency, they correct you that it is, in fact, digital gold. When in fact, it's just a technology medium for transmitting value without the economic mechanisms to be a currency, nor the historical/economic/political/social mechanisms to be a 'digital gold'.

oxide 9y ago
Well said. I've moved to altcoins for sending money, the transaction fees of bitcoin finally pushed me to another one. I wish I'd buy a little extra to speculate myself, but I'm pretty impatient so I'd better not.
trevelyan 9y ago
> I don't know what possible source gave you the idea that divisibility == unlimited, but sadly, it's wrong. It would require a hard fork, but it is technically possible to increase the divisibility of the base satoshi unit. And it should be an uncontroversial change if needed, since it will not require any redistribution of money. With that said, it doesn't seem likely that the value of a bitcoin will increase in the near future to the point where we will actually need more than 21 quadrillion units of precision.
ilyagr 9y ago
What are there flaws in the Bitcoin as digital gold analogy? I don't follow r/Bitcoin and would appreciate a summary. From my limited level of understanding, it seems that the only differences are that you know that Bitcoin has no inherent value at all (gold has some since it can be used to make jewelery and gold-plated audio connectors, among other things) and you know exactly how much Bitcoin can ever be mined.
- qplex 9y ago
  It's marketing. Instead of explaining what Bitcoin actually is you compare it to something very simple that everybody knows and derive "digital gold" ...
  - timthelion 9y ago
    Gold is also marketing. No one is going yaya over other, similarly rare elements [1]. Tantalum is significantly less common then gold, for example, and doesn't tarnish! And yet gold is 320x more expensive than tantalum [2] [3]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#/media/File:Elements_abundance-bars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... [2] https://www.metalary.com/tantalum-price/ https://www.metalary.com/tantalum-price/ [3] https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold-price/today/kilograms/usd/ https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold-price/today/kilograms/u...

oxide 9y ago

Well said. I've moved to altcoins for sending money, the transaction fees of bitcoin finally pushed me to another one. I wish I'd buy a little extra to speculate myself, but I'm pretty impatient so I'd better not.

trevelyan 9y ago

> I don't know what possible source gave you the idea that divisibility == unlimited, but sadly, it's wrong. It would require a hard fork, but it is technically possible to increase the divisibility of the base satoshi unit. And it should be an uncontroversial change if needed, since it will not require any redistribution of money. With that said, it doesn't seem likely that the value of a bitcoin will increase in the near future to the point where we will actually need more than 21 quadrillion units of precision.

ilyagr 9y ago

What are there flaws in the Bitcoin as digital gold analogy? I don't follow r/Bitcoin and would appreciate a summary. From my limited level of understanding, it seems that the only differences are that you know that Bitcoin has no inherent value at all (gold has some since it can be used to make jewelery and gold-plated audio connectors, among other things) and you know exactly how much Bitcoin can ever be mined.

qplex 9y ago
It's marketing. Instead of explaining what Bitcoin actually is you compare it to something very simple that everybody knows and derive "digital gold" ...
- timthelion 9y ago
  Gold is also marketing. No one is going yaya over other, similarly rare elements [1]. Tantalum is significantly less common then gold, for example, and doesn't tarnish! And yet gold is 320x more expensive than tantalum [2] [3]! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements#/media/File:Elements_abundance-bars.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elem... [2] https://www.metalary.com/tantalum-price/ https://www.metalary.com/tantalum-price/ [3] https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold-price/today/kilograms/usd/ https://www.bullionbypost.co.uk/gold-price/today/kilograms/u...