Bitcoin Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for Bitcoin crypto-currency enthusiasts. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
Bitcoin USD price is increasing continuously; it is not impossible to imagine a day where we get 1 satoshi = 1 USD cent or even more, 1 satoshi = 1 USD. In that scenario we have a problem, bitcoin micropayments will be impossible, even with Lightning Network.
I know it is possible to increase the decimal places of bitcoin, e.g. 1 BTC = 1 00000000 00000000 units. My question is, how it can be done?
The Bitcoin developers would have to hard fork the chain to allow it.
I also don't think Bitcoin can get that expensive. Your talking 1 BTC = $100,000,000. If that's the case, the Bitcoin market cap would be $1,670,673,700,000,000 (1.6 quadrillion dollars). There is no such figure of money similar to that in circulation.
If one Satoshi would be 1 dolar, then the full market cap of Bitcoin would be all the coins available multiplied by it's price.
There is 16707388 bitcoins in circulation at 29th/november/2017.
A satoshi is smallest amount, the one 0.00000001 BTC.
So, if one bicoin is 10^8 satoshis and you suppose one satoshi will reach one dolar, then you really mean is that bitcoin price is will soon reach 10^8 dolars. If you really think bitcoins will be priced at 100 million. So, the total market price would be 16707388 * 10000000 = 16707388*10^8 =~ 16,7*10^14. That is a very great number. 1670 trillion dolars. This site tries to especulate on the total number of money available here.
So, there is still much room for Bitcoins to apreciate before such problem happens.
First, if a satoshi becomes a dolar, there is still much transactions that can be done in a block. A block should have sufficient size to offer many transactions and still be profitable. And if bitcoin apreciates beyond imagination, then people would not use it for small trades. As simple as that. I just don't see people carring diamonds and gold to buy grocery goods.
Bitcoin is already greater than 5 Bolivars, and greater than 1 Yen. If a satoshi ends up a greater value than 1 dollar it will likely mean that the dollar has significantly devalued to likely equal to the buying power of 1 cent. See Monstrum's answer to see the valuation of dollars to bitcoin.
It's a real possibility, given that gum that I could buy for a 50 cents as a kid now costs greater than a dollar for my kids. Given that the US dollar is inflationary by design, 1 dollar to a 1 cent buying power has essentially already occurred. The buying power of 4 cents in 1913 is equivalent to the buying power of 1 dollar today (Source: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/) to put that in perspective, a bitcoin is worth only $300 USD in 1913 money.
I don't see that a satoshi/dollar equivalency issue is problematic so long as the buying power of a satoshi remains reasonable, and as Monstrum's evaluation of the market cap suggests, a massive amount of cryptocurrency would have to have been lost/destroyed to create such a deficit of supply and demand, so much so that the current iteration of the bitcoin network would be unfeasible, a hard fork or altcoin would be adopted I suppose. Such a scenario would be a decent argument that every individual is responsible for their share of stewardship of the bitcoin network, down to responsible wallet management.
