Hi snake, you are correct the way the protocol is set up so that each bitcoin can be divided into something like 100million units, this allows for micro transactions. To that point, as a currency one of the definitions of a currency is that it can be divisible into smaller units. As for the 21 million coins this is part of what makes BTC so appealing to me,one cannot just make more. With our Fiat currency (U.S. dollar) the Federal Reserve just prints more. This is part and parcel of why the bitcoin is considered a deflationary currency. Again, the term currency is being debated as many feel that BTC is an commodity rather than a currency. I did watch the video of the mining "farm" in Iceland and there are many such investors who have entered this market to that end. Some of these mining computers are tens of thousands of dollars each. This is sort of what I was eluding to in an earlier post with regard to the difficulty's the average person would experience if attempting to mine for them. A simple cost analysis typically shows that mining favors the early adopters of the Bitcoin. The uniqueness of this system is that it is what is referred to as an "open source" protocol. This means that anyone in the world who wishes to look at the code can. All transactions are transparent and anyone can view the blockchain at anytime. I am not sure why the inventor/inventors settled on 21million. The way the system works is a set amount of them are rewarded to miners every ten minutes or so what is refereed to as a "Block." Miners are rewarded based on the amount of computing power and random luck. Each rewarded block at present is 25 Bitcoins. Every four years the number of bitcoins rewarded in a block is halved. It was 50 now 25, in 2017 12.5 etc... you get the point. The difficulty in mining will continue to climb and as a natural process of that design the value of BTC will also continue to climb. :tu:
The bitcoin foundation, (the group responsible for managing) has had many of the top computer scientist working on exposing any weaknesses. In fact a group of hackers were employed to do just that and they were unable to find a weakness in the code. The protocol is being vetted even as I type this.
Dennis
