Oh, I see. It must have appeared I was being serious. I was joking. The idea of trying to figure out your pay raise to the decimal while being itself a subfractional number seems ridiculous when you consider how money is usually handled today.
Missed window.
For clarification, I would like to say by joke I for sure mean to say I’m not bringing serious discussion here.
And that is great
If you had an economy run exclusively on bitcoins I can see the limited supply being an issue, but it was never intended to act as a sole, fiat currency for some imaginary economy. Even if you consider it as a primary currency for int’l drug dealing or arms trading say, there will always be other media of exchange that will also be accepted such as other currencies.
Presumably, if bitcoins ever catch on, and 0.000001 bitcoins is a meaningful, practical amount, then some new name will be invented for a unit that’s equal to 0.000001 bitcoins.
I still don’t understand how a transaction from one computer to another can be anonymous. If the accounts to and from which they’re being transferred are not traceable, how does one establish ownership?
This is a bit of a misunderstanding in how the notion of “accounts” work in the Bitcoin system.
Bitcoins don’t belong to a “person”. They belong to an “address”. An address is simply another number. Think of it like an account number at a bank.
The system is currently geared such that there are 2^160 possible addresses. This is probably more than will ever be needed, from now until the heat death of the universe. It’s a very large number. 
Every coin, or fraction of a coin, starts with some mined block. Then, it is “spent” by transferring it to another address. That new address can then respend it by sending it to another address. And so on. Actually, this is a gross oversimplification of the real process, but for now, it’ll do to explain the idea of anonymity.
When I generate an address to receive some coins, I do some very complicated math, and create a unique set of private and public keys. The public key is the address where the bitcoins are sent to. The private key is a secret number, that only I know, but which I can use to prove that I “own” those coins, and therefore have the right to “spend” them by sending them elsewhere.
Now, which coins go to what accounts is not only totally traceable, it’s completely and totally public. ALL bitcoin transfers are recorded on the public blockchain.
But, the address is just a number. It’s not actually tied to a “person”. If you take actions which can tie a specific account to you, well, then you’re not anonymous anymore.
In fact, if you want to be secure and anonymous, you use a completely different address for every transaction. All this is abstracted for you, you generally don’t have to think about it if you use a smart client. The coins you “own” are the ones that you control by having the private keys for their very public addresses. Unless you do something that can tie the coins back to your actual name, they’re just owned by the equivalent of a numbered account. Anybody with the secret code can spend them.
Getting that secret code via pure math is basically impossible. Getting it via, say, hacking your computer is far more likely. But again, we’re into the realm of pure math here. I can write down my private keys onto a piece of paper, wipe the computers I used, then travel anywhere, and use any secure computing device to spend them. Those private keys completely control the coins. Whoever has them, owns the coins in that account. Like a numbered bank account.
True, however whether deflation is a “bad thing” is arguable too. One could argue that reckless spending in order to keep up with inflation is a bad thing as well. It makes no sense to save money when the money continually becomes worth less over time.
I take no position in this particular argument, BTW. I’m no economist. Bitcoin is indeed a deflationary currency, but this is by design.
If I don’t have to pay any real money to verify the artifical money, deal.
In Soviet Russia, bitcoin outlaws you!
I don’t think the way BTC can be deleted should be underestimated. The total number will never be the stated 21,000,000 because they are being deleted all the time for whatever reason.
But that’s OK because there are litecoin, feathercoin, etc etc.
Eventually the unit of exchange will just be the Joule.
I believe that’s 100 satochi.
Powers &8^]