IIRC we’ve already had one!
Thanks. Is this the 2019 poll you are referring to?
Summary of 53 Voters:
51% voted to “Use max allowed variable for Safecoin 1 MAID => 4.294967296 safecoin (~4.3 safecoin/MAID)”
38% voted to “Keep to 2^32 coins for SAFE coin 1 MAID => 1 Safecoin”
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Probably yes. I was thinking about how to handle distribution after publication of the first version of the RFC but maybe that didn’t go to a poll.
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If you agree that increasing divisibility increases supply (you agreed)
Then the simple answer is supply and demand.
If I have 10 SNT totaling 1000 subunits and 1100 users, each user could not have 1 subunit.
Not enough to go around, scarcity.
If I have 10 SNT and 10,000 subunits and 1100 users there is abundance to go around, each user can have many.
You don’t think that has economic impact?
I think that few people care about the technicality of this because it does not directly affect them through dilution.
I am open to being convinced otherwise!
I think that answers why I think it should be no more open to change than the number of SNT. @happybeing
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I don’t know about any good link, only what I remember when it was news.
One problem was technical - some exchanges and other services, that needed to work with exchange rates between IOTA and other coins or fiat, were unable to work with so many decimal places. Most services do 6-8 decimal places, IOTA/BTC needed something like 12-14 decimal places because 1 IOTA was something like 0.0000000000001 BTC.
The other problem is psychological. Almost nobody is able to imagine 10000000000 or 0.00000000001, we know how to work with these numbers mathematically, but not intuitively. Difference between 1 and 1000 is easy, but 10000000 and 10000000000 are both “a lot” and you don’t feel the 1000x difference. When two politicians steal public money, one steals $100000 and the other steals $1000000000, a lot of people will hate the first one more, because $100k is amount they understand and know “how much is it worth”. It is hard to quantify how many people it discouraged from IOTA, but this trouble of human brain thinking about very big/small numbers is well known.
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Bitcoin itself is an example with increased divisibility after launch. Before lightning network, the smallest unit was satoshi (1 sat = 10-8 bitcoins), but now a lightning invoice amount is expressed in millisatoshi (1 msat = 10-11 bitcoins). This allows to send very very small payments.
This is uncorrelated to Bitcoin market price.
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You’re contriving a scenario where there’s a problem, but one which doesn’t exist in practice on Safe Network or in economies generally because… they ensure there are enough subunits to avoid this difficulty.
Once you ensure that, further division has no effect. And since that’s where we’re starting, further increases in divisibility does not affect money supply of SNT (ie total value of SNT) - using the economic definition of money supply.
When economists talk about money supply they are talking about the total dollars, or pounds etc in circulation. When the UK did away with farthings or halfpennies it didn’t change the money supply.
Somebody gave the example of share splits. This doesn’t affect the value of the business - the equivalent of money supply total value.
If you create more money, print more pounds, mint more SNT etc. you do increase the money supply. Same when a bank creates a loan out of thin air, more money enters circulation until the loan is paid off that money is removed again.
But if the maximum number of SNT is capped, the money supply can’t increase beyond that even if you increase the number of subunits. (Assuming the economic definition of money supply).
So I concede that it’s possible to construct a scenario where increased divisibility has an effect, but you have to start from a place of scarcity for that to matter, where it interferes with the usefulness of the currency. All currencies attempt to avoid this though it can happen.
In practice subdivisions are increased or decreased to avoid that scarcity of units and keep the units of currency at a level where they don’t hobble usefulness.
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off-chain, not a consensus rule change, subset of btc economy, so a bit apples/oranges but kinda interesting precedent, sure.
btw, I never have understood (or looked into) how lightning channels can “settle up” using an on-chain tx when the balance does not match a whole satoshi. Do they round, trunc, ceil, or what? And if so, that appears to be lossy, which seems problematic…
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This is related to decimal placement (divisibility), not naming of units.
As I understand it, the smallest (base) unit is the IOTA and the unit for trading/pricing is the MegaIOTA aka Miota which is 1 million IOTA. So people can think/transact in Miota using “intuitive” numbers, but there is always a subtle reminder in the name about the “true” representation. This makes a ton of sense to me, and is what I’ve been advocating for SNT.
Ok, at least that’s the theory. Now you are saying it didn’t work well in practice, so that’s the part I’m curious about. But then you don’t mention about the iota/miota distinction, so I’m left a bit confused.
They wanted to use only IOTA in the beginning, nothing else, that was the problem. (Also there were some hacks and other reasons too).
They did a network redesign and as a part of the comeback they started using MIOTA as the base unit to be more user friendly and more compatible with other things.
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ah that explains it, thx.
My thought has always been to have names for all the 10^3 units, at least. Ideally the market would choose/settle on which named unit to first use for trade given supply/demand and the known total number of base tokens. However picking an arbitrary (named) unit to use for exchange pricing at launch seems a reasonable compromise given how accustomed the industry has become to that.
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No, because demand is for SNT and the supply of SNT is not changing - only the ratio of SNT to total supply changes via a change in subunits.
Sure and the ratio isn’t changing such that there is going to be a lack of abundance. We will have far more subunits than bitcoin and many other variants - so being able to purchase or earn some subunits will be easy.
The reason companies do stock splits is because the price of the stock goes really high and that locks the little guy out of the market - they can’t afford a $1000 share. So they split it a couple of times and now it’s a $250 share. SN tokens aren’t going to reach a level where people can’t afford to buy some amount of subunits.
So no - this change in total subunits isn’t going to affect the economics.
Further and to be clear on a side point - the market cap is measured via SNT (which is constant - only the ratio of SNT to total subunits changes). So no matter the subunit volume, the marketcap and the price for SNT remains the same. If the price and the marketcap remain the same, then the demand remains the same.
So I see no change to the economics in this case. If Maidsafe were reducing the number of subunits dramatically - then I’d be concerned because the little guy would get priced out of the market at some stage if they were reduced too much – and of course that might also cause havoc with data storage costs too.
If I’m still not understanding your argument, then I apologize for my profound stupidity, please try again.
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I have failed at making my point, it seems apparent. Going to shelve it and move on instead. 
Whether I am right or wrong matters not if 99.9% see no problem.
In short at the very core I just want divisibility decided upon and not open to change.
Nit picking really.
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Yes, but the problem only appears when you close the channel and sending payments at msat precision has still its use case on lightning.
But my main point is that even though implementation isn’t perfect, increased divisibility didn’t have any negative impacts on bitcoin price. And if the implementation had been better then there is no reason that the result would have been different.
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I am the last person due to zero knolwledge and very little facility. But I wonder still why the unit isn’t set to the bottom of what we can practically conceive, a peppercorn an electron a quark. Answer must be because the numbers would be too large to be practical. And what would be gained? Not having to worry about divisibility? But why build in divisibility? Because for psychological reasons we build in inflation and like to retire old units with new units and because values shift up and down. I feel like the crypto people are trying to reinvent fiat. And the fiat people just wanted a crypto patch for fiat edge cases. Maybe ai will perfect money for us before retiring it.
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when for one maid will be 50 000+$, then you will know why we need so much divisibility.
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Meanwhile 1 MAID is worth 13 of your American cents on Bittrex today so, while good to plan for the future, needing to divide by 10^9 is some way off
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Whereas really it comes down more to usability and the need for micro-transactions (or should I say nano-transactions).
For the primary use of the Network, this then is concerned with the smallest conceivable upload, and then the pricing of data storage at a given time.
I should say, as hardware tech and capacity advances, with the minimum upload remaining the same, this may well become more and more critical; but we don’t really know. Best to maximise the divisibility with in the bounds of performance, to be sure.
Secondary, might be any other type of transaction: general commerce, trading, in-app functions, and where the degree of rounding might hamper all of the above.
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Thank you for the heavy work team MaidSafe! I add the translations in the first post 
Privacy. Security. Freedom
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