One Trillion Turtles: Coin Supply and Unit Economics
Out of everything we get asked the most, and probably the biggest criticism, we, as a project, receive, is..
“Gee, a trillion coins.. That’s a lot of coins, are you sure that’s a good idea? Nobody would ever list that, the value is too low.”
The first time someone raised that argument, I’ll admit I was impressed, which faded to disappointment, but then ultimately I settled for excited, because I knew I’d get many chances over the following weeks to explain why TurtleCoin was built this way. This article is a summary of our rebuttal for why there are so many TRTL to be generated.
Let’s talk about supply.
When we say “coins” or “total supply” or “total TRTL”, what we mean is that there are1,000,000,000,000.00 TRTL planned to be emitted over the lifetime of the network. That’s 1 Trillion total TurtleCoins. You might ask, “what about the “total supply” of some of the most popular coins out there?”
BTC ~21,000,000 (lifetime)
LTC — 84,000,000 (lifetime)
ETH ~97,883,120.97 (currently)
TRTL — 1,000,000,000,000 (lifetime)
IOTA — 2,779,530,283,277,761 (lifetime)
When we say “units” or “divisible units” or “shells” or “turtle cents”, we are talking about the two numbers after the decimal, which are the smallest 0.01 pieces of TRTL that can be made. So when removing the decimals, we get the following amounts of units:
TRTL — 100,000,000,000,000
BTC ~ 2,100,000,000,000,000 Satoshis
IOTA — 2,779,530,283,277,761 IOTA
LTC — 8,400,000,000,000,000 Photons
ETH — 97,879,990,190,000,000,000,000,000 Wei
According to my googling of these figures, you’ll notice TRTL has a number of units far lower than the others surrounding it.
So what’s all the fuss about? Why did we choose to even have a decimal place, instead of having bigger unit groups like kTRTL’s or something?
It’s really just a psychological thing. We didn’t intend to make it this way, it’s just a response to how humans think; there is still a large vocal majority of new and inexperienced people who say “Bitcoin is too expensive, I’ll never be able to buy it” and that mentality will probably never be changed.
Conversely, there is an equal amount of uninitiated users that find the amount of digits to the right of the decimal place off-putting and hard to grasp. This way of thinking about numbers when it comes to money, frankly, has very little chance of changing for these two groups of people, and that’s okay.
Part of getting new users is about meeting them in the middle. That means giving them numbers and systems that are familiar and relatable to them.
So, while we know and acknowledge that the decimal placing doesn’t matter, why don’t we put it somewhere that makes everyone feel good, in a place where shoppers can do the math easily in their heads, and miners can realize an adequate return on a day’s work mining.
I think ultimately this will serve us better from a new-user‘s ’perspective.
If you have ideas you’d like to contribute, please leave them as a response below, or join us in the Discord Chat
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If you want to know more about what TurtleCoin is, http://turtlecoin.lol
If you want to start mining TurtleCoin, http://mining.turtlecoin.lol
