user121250: A couple of linked questions really. Firstly, let's say BTC is worth $50k US, that means to purchase your groceries might be 0.002BTC. A sandwich might be 0.0000598. Has a system already been proposed to have better units? With 1 US cent equating to 0.000002BTC could we ever have precision issues?
Secondly, with a hard limit of 21 million BTC and a world population of 8bn, we're talking each person on average could own around .0025BTC. Which at current market cap, is about $100 US. By contrast there's approx $40tn US in regular cash, about 40-60X the market cap of BTC if I didn't make a silly mistake (and depending the value the day you read this).
Doesn't this imply that for BTC to be a real-world currency, it's already large value must end up more like $2m US per coin. At which point your $2.99 sandwich is going to cost 0.000001495 and we're needing 9 decimal places for accurate accounting to the equivalent of one US cent today.
As a newcomer to this world, how does BTC plan to work around these issues to be a practical everyday currency? Is it a trivial thing, or actually a problem?

user13866: Today 1 US dollar is 0.000027 BTC which is 2,700 Satoshi
So one US cent is 27 Satoshi
When was the last time you purchased something with a total transaction value of one cent?
If Bitcoin's value increases as you say then there will be a need for a smaller unit. I think the Lightning Network can already have transactions measured in millisatoshi - a thousand times smaller.
So, It isn't a major problem.
It isn't especially unusual for the major unit of a currency to have a high value. For example the UK currency known as the pound sterling was created in the early Anglo-Saxon period one and a half millennia ago and was essentially a pound weight of silver. That represented a huge amount of money at the time, enough to buy several thousand chickens or a hundred knives at a time when ordinary people could probably afford few of either.

Related questions:

What is a millisatoshi? I thought satoshi is the smallest unit?
Why can we have small fractions of a Bitcoin?
What is the smallest fee you can pay for an on chain transaction?


121250: <p>A couple of linked questions really. Firstly, let's say BTC is worth $50k US, that means to purchase your groceries might be 0.002BTC. A sandwich might be 0.0000598. Has a system already been proposed to have better units? With 1 US cent equating to 0.000002BTC could we ever have precision issues?</p>
<p>Secondly, with a hard limit of 21 million BTC and a world population of 8bn, we're talking each person on average could own around .0025BTC. Which at current market cap, is about $100 US. By contrast there's approx $40tn US in regular cash, about 40-60X the market cap of BTC if I didn't make a silly mistake (and depending the value the day you read this).</p>
<p>Doesn't this imply that for BTC to be a real-world currency, it's already large value must end up more like $2m US per coin. At which point your $2.99 sandwich is going to cost 0.000001495 and we're needing 9 decimal places for accurate accounting to the equivalent of one US cent today.</p>
<p>As a newcomer to this world, how does BTC plan to work around these issues to be a practical everyday currency? Is it a trivial thing, or actually a problem?</p>
 13866: <p>Today 1 US dollar is 0.000027 BTC which is 2,700 Satoshi
So one US cent is 27 Satoshi</p>
<p>When was the last time you purchased something with a total transaction value of one cent?</p>
<p>If Bitcoin's value increases as you say then there will be a need for a smaller unit. I think the Lightning Network can already have transactions measured in millisatoshi - a thousand times smaller.</p>
<p>So, It isn't a major problem.</p>
<p>It isn't especially unusual for the major unit of a currency to have a high value. For example the UK currency known as the pound sterling was created in the early Anglo-Saxon period one and a half millennia ago and was essentially a pound weight of silver. That represented a huge amount of money at the time, enough to buy several thousand chickens or a hundred knives at a time when ordinary people could probably afford few of either.</p>
<hr />
<p>Related questions:</p>
<ul>
<li><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/69700/13866">What is a millisatoshi? I thought satoshi is the smallest unit?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/3663/13866">Why can we have small fractions of a Bitcoin?</a></li>
<li><a href="https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/q/75962/13866">What is the smallest fee you can pay for an on chain transaction?</a></li>
</ul>
