re: Bitcoin Casinos Release 2012 Earnings

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The whole 'finite amount will ever be made' kind of blows my mind.

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My bad. An important part that I failed to mention is that bitcoins are infinitely divisible. Right now, the protocol is set to 8 decimals, but it can be easily extended by the community if necessary.

Here's the answer from the bitcoin Myths page:

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21 million coins isn't enough; doesn't scale
One Bitcoin is divisible down to eight decimal places. There are really 2,099,999,997,690,000 (just over 2 quadrillion) maximum possible atomic units in the bitcoin design. The value of "1 BTC" represents 100,000,000 of these. In other words, each is divisible by up to 10^8. As the value of the unit of 1 BTC grows too large to be useful for day to day transactions, people can start dealing in smaller units, such as milli-bitcoins (mBTC) or micro-bitcoins (µBTC).

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Let's say you have some bitcoins and buy something and now you're out. Are you just forever out of bitcoins unless you sell something, since no more will be made?

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Well, it's just all about exchange of value. You could sell something to earn more bitcoins, or provide a service. Or you could just go to one of the exchanges to trade fiat currency for bitcoin. The 21 million limitation is there to ensure that the currency is deflationary in nature.

Now, I acknowledge that there are a lot of smart people out there that will say a deflationary currency will fail. I guess we'll just have to wait and see.


The thing is though, even if bitcoin fails, the "digital currency" cat is out of the bag. Bitcoin may fail, but something else will just learn from its mistakes and take its place. There is already a few other forms of digital currency out there, most notably Litecoin, but Bitcoin is the king right now.