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I always tell financially conservative people they can buy US$1 worth of Bitcoins just so they can learn how it works. I think many newcomers believe Bitcoins

by igorsyl 14y ago

I always tell financially conservative people they can buy US$1 worth of Bitcoins just so they can learn how it works. I think many newcomers believe Bitcoins are indivisible.

zacksjoden 14y ago
I've been reading off and on about Bitcoins on HN for a while and had no idea that they could be broken down into smaller units. From Wikipedia: "In trade, one bitcoin is subdivided into 100-million smaller units called satoshis, defined by eight decimal places.[4]"
- wmf 14y ago
  I think this partly stems from the term "Bitcoin" itself, since coins are not divisible (having moved beyond pieces of eight long ago). But there are no coins in Bitcoin! It's all just txouts and txins.
  - vbuterin 14y ago
    You can think of it as a magically valuable liquid flowing down a system of ever-growing pipes representing the blockchain where the transactions are linking points and txins and txouts are pipes with their cross-section areas corresponding to their respective values. Once you think about it, the analogy fits perfectly.
  - patrikr 14y ago
    "Coin" in the Bitcoin system is a nickname for a transaction output. The value of a coin can be anything, 1 BTC, 0.000345 BTC, 500,000 BTC...
PanMan 14y ago
oke, sounds like a plan. What's the easiest place to buy 1/50th bitcoin? I created a Coinbase account, but that seems US only :(
- tlrobinson 14y ago
  https://mtgox.com/ https://mtgox.com/ https://localbitcoins.com/ https://localbitcoins.com/
- nym 14y ago
  Send me a message with your email address on http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/contact/ http://howdoyoubuybitcoins.com/contact/ and I'll send you a small amount for free.
  - PanMan 14y ago
    I just figured out I have this adres at coinbase: 1AL1NkXgkoCHA4VCFwyn4E12orw4cSbWhQ