3 ms·
Serious question, why does the price of a single bitcoin matter when they're divisible to 8 decimal places? Beyond a psychological barrier people have thinking
by etherael 14y ago
Serious question, why does the price of a single bitcoin matter when they're divisible to 8 decimal places? Beyond a psychological barrier people have thinking about the 1:100 thing, it's really irrelevant if your cup of coffee costs 10 bitcoins or 0.00001 bitcoins, especially if the calculation is made at the time of purchase relative to an underlying stable value like a basket of the largest fiat currencies in circulation or somesuch, or just the boring plain old USD.
1 BTC = 1000000 USD To put it in a less psychologically alarming way is exactly the same as saying 1 Satoshi = 0.01 USD.
- zanny 14y agoPeople have been measuring the value of a BTC by its whole value until now because it was relative to fiat currencies in whole dollars that way. If BTC was ever worth a million USD, they would probably be talking in Satoshis. It isn't any more complicated than thinking of the difference between $1 and 0.01 cent.
- T-hawk 14y agoIt doesn't matter, mathematically. Psychologically, it absolutely does. Bitcoin running to $150 is way more splashy and headline-grabby than $15. And at Bitcoin's beginning, it looked more respectable in gaining followers when 1 BTC was somewhere near $1 than if it were $0.01 and looking like some penny-stock scam. Same goes for stock prices. Apple and Google have let the shares run to $400 and $700 instead of splitting to a more industry-standard two-digit number. Of coures the per-share price is meaningless in itself, it'd be the same if ten times as many shares existed at one-tenth the price. But it's a lot easier to grab eyeballs with a stock shooting through $400, $500, $600 benchmarks than a pedestrian $50.