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475 sats \ 8 replies \ @justin_shocknet 30 Sep \ on: What about Bitcoin are you too embarrassed to admit you still don't understand? bitcoin
I don't understand why it was designed with "whole coins" being different than the base unit to where decimals are colloquial but not real in the sense of being floating point
I've seen theories about the emission schedule but they make even less sense
Not questioning it because it worked, but it's hard to explain to noobs... The bip to rename the base unit is cringe attention marketing but highlights the inconsistency
Because floating point operations create rounding problems in computers. You must set certain precision (8 decimals) and then work with integer units of that precision (people decided to call them sats).
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Yea the question isn't why its not floating point, but why the macro unit differs from the base unit.
Psyops the only explanation: #1243715
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In what currency macro unit is the same as micro?
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The Yen, notable given the Japanese nym
The Won...
Probably Ding.. probably countless others throughout history
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Yen has no micro unit. A single won is divided into 100 jeon, the monetary subunit.
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It's like satoshi was optimistic enough to make 21 quadrillion coins, but not brave enough to release it that way, and chickened out, giving us 1 bitcoin = 100 million bitcoins
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Yea I assume they had leveraged psych research into unit bias and momentum/velocity... would anyone care, even at current market cap, if the headlines were shit like "Bitcoin hits $.0001 per coin!"
$1 per coin very early on makes everything that comes after it possible
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$1 per coin very early on makes everything that comes after it possible
1000 sats per dollar does not sound anywhere near as exciting, sadly.
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