3 ms·

I work in the accounting space. In the current systems we develop today this would need to be able to handle trillions(up to 14 places) at least and most likely

• Finster 8y ago
  And in the cryptocurrency space, we need way more than 7 decimal places.
• strainer 8y ago
  The ubiquitous float Double has 15 places of accuracy that is secure for summing integers up to that size. I think the core frustration is how values less than one are subject to about 1 million-billionth part of noise, which could be tolerated except that factors like inflation are recorded as fixed decimals. For example, if monthly inflation is standardized as 5 significant digits, then for 0.0012345 - the rounding to 5 sd actually introduced about one hundred-thousandth part of noise to whatever the real value was, but the number is then considered precise. Subsequent encoding of 0.0012345 to a float Double is ten billion times less imprecise than the writing of 0.00123447... to 5 sd was, but it is an unwanted inconsistency that is difficult to securely keep out of the fixed point results, even though they are kept to much lower precision.