I understand the smallest denomination, 0.00000001 (did I get the right number of zeros?) is called a satoshi, after the creator of Bitcoin. Correct me if I'm wrong here, with 21 millions coins and 8 decimal places, you have about 2 quadrillion [1] satoshis, which does seems to be quite a bit to last for a while. I'm guessing we hit the 2038 problem [2] first.

Of note, the US money supply, even including 2 decimal places, creates a space of 331 trillion units [3], as of 2016 [4].

[1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=(21+million)+*+(10%5E8) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem [3] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=3317+billion+*+10%5E2 [4] http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/money-supply-m...

Yes, that generally comports with my understanding.

The hard part will be handling enough transactions without becoming centralized. Currently, the blockchain is ~90GB. With most users on mobile devices, very few will be running full clients, because syncing the blockchain will move too much data.

So increasing block size is very contentious. One camp is OK with centralization. The other basically wants to make Bitcoin like gold, and create currencies based on it.

...and you would never want to have a precious metal be a currency.

Some disagree. There are advantages and disadvantages. And, as I vaguely understand it, Bitcoin was designed to have advantages of both precious metals and fiat currencies.

There are basically disadvantages. "Goldbugs" sprung up after governments realised that prosperous first-world economies need monetary management if they're to stay prosperous.

Recovery from the Great Depression correlates closely to how quickly a country left the gold standard.

It's a standard mode of pseudoscience to vociferously advocate a discarded idea. This applies to economics as much as science.

In the Bitcoin 0.1 release notes, Satoshi Nakamoto said:

> The root problem with conventional currency is all the trust that's required to make it work. The central bank must be trusted not to debase the currency, but the history of fiat currencies is full of breaches of that trust. Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve. We have to trust them with our privacy, trust them not to let identity thieves drain our accounts. Their massive overhead costs make micropayments impossible.

Bitcoin failed at every one of Nakamoto’s aspirations here. The price is ridiculously volatile and has had multiple bubbles; the unregulated exchanges, with no central bank backing, front-run their customers, paint the tape to manipulate the price, and are hacked or just steal their users’ funds; and transaction fees and the unreliability of transactions make micropayments completely unfeasible. Because all of this is based in crank ideas that don’t work in practice.

Well, it has worked just fine for me, for the last three years. The Mt Gox bubble was a pain, I admit. But what matters for me is having an anonymous payment system with wide acceptance.

> But what matters for me is having an anonymous payment system with wide acceptance.

So failure (not anonymous, not wide acceptance) is "worked just fine"?

Well, it's anonymous enough after mixing 2-3 times through Tor, using different mixing services, in small amounts, among Electrum wallets, each in its own Whonix instance. And I can anonymously lease servers, VPS and VPNs. So yes, it works just fine :)

It's built to have a near constant stock of currency. There's literally no room for stimulus. I can appreciate that people may not agree with stimulus, but it was the only thing that ended the first Great Depression.

OK, so I'm not an economist. But arguably it was WWII that ended the depression. And yes, the war was largely financed by printing more money.

So maybe you base currencies on Bitcoin. Some people can keep using Bitcoin for trade, just as some use gold now.