[GNC] Bitcoin Lightning payments

[Michael or Penny Novack]

On 6/18/2022 12:05 AM, HSC wrote:
> Thank you, Michael D Novack!
> That's a great solution until GNC development catches up to the crypto world: we will keep separate GNC file for each cryptoasset.
>
> The remaining problem is that Bitcoin Lightning goes to 11 decimal places, and Ethereum I think goes to 16.
> Will round up to 1 sat for now, since it's still of insignificant value, but eventually that will also need some improvement.
>
There is a (potential) solution for that. Probably not workable for 
ridiculously high number of decimal points* you described. But let's say 
you needed something smaller than that range.

It is called "scaling". You have probably seen examples of this if you 
have looked at the annual report of organizations where the totals are 
in the tens or hundreds of millions. Instead of being in whole dollars, 
the report might be in units of a thousand dollars. It also works the 
other way around.

Thus if you needed to express quantities of the order of $0.00001 
(hundredths of a mil) but only had two decimal points available you 
could scale to the mil instead of the dollar << in other words "1" would 
stand for one mil, not one dollar >> If your problem is NOW the range of 
values being too large to fit in the fields, I'll refer you to the 
reasoning below.

Michael D Novack

* PHYSICAL reality is constrained by relative number of decimal points 
to a relatively small number, say at most, six or seven. I am talking 
here about when "adding things". In other words, when talking about real 
things, 1,000,000 and 1,000,001 are essentially equal. If you were 
counting two heaps separately, how certain would you be that they were 
actually unequal (or would an error in counting be more likely). We 
don't use counting, addition, subtraction, etc. to make a decision like 
that (though we could use "pairing"). In similar fashion, given two 
pieces of glass, one on top of the other, could measure how much farther 
apart in the middle than at the edges in wavelengths of light used to 
make the observation, or by how much the curvature of the surface 
departed from some conic section, but not in terms of the thickness of 
the pieces of glass.

PS --- Not the place to discuss what "money" is, but it isn't, even in 
the case of "fiat currencies" something that is determined by fiat. 
That's why governments, etc. cannot control inflation/contraction by 
fiat. The EXISTENCE of "money", how much exists, depends on its 
circulation in the economy.