3 ms·
> Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that
by noch 5y ago
> Currently, you can only chop them up into atoms worth 1e-8 BTC (satoshis), but there isn't much that needs be changed in the code and the protocol to get that to much finer grained.
Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. But, no worries because we have millisatoshis in Lightning. Because Bitcoin scales in layers, each layer can implement more and more divisibility as required.
https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704 https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/a/69704
As you said, bitcoin is infinitely divisible, therefore the world economy can run on 1 btc or 1 satoshi.
- ur-whale 5y ago> Such a change would be a hard fork and, as you know, we don't do that in Bitcoin. True, it'd be a hard fork. However, I don't believe hard forks are impossible if managed properly. The taproot upgrade (not a hard fork, I know) was rather uncontroversial and accepted rather easily. I suspect a hard fork allowing for - say - bitcoin amounts encoded in 64 bits would not necessarily generate the kind of upheaval the blocksize wars did. And, hopefully, even for controversial upgrades, the lessons of said wars will have been learnt and the process of upgrading Bitcoin can be done in a slightly more reasonable / orderly fashion.