# Gavin Andresen
# 2011-01-29 02:28:26
# https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3034.msg42292#msg42292

luke-jr's patches got me thinking about whether or not passing double-precision values over the JSON-RPC api would ever cause problems.  I've convinced myself it isn't an issue: @p{par}

JSON numbers are 64-bit double-precision floating point values, which have 53 bits of precision. @p{par}

21 million bitcoins is actually 2,100,000,000,000,000 (2.1 quadrillion) of the smallest possible unit.  That's a bit over 2^{51} @p{--} you need just over 51 bits to represent them. @p{par}

So, unless your JSON library is buggy, you should never run into rounding errors converting to/from JSON, even if you're sending 0.00000001 bitcoins. @p{brk}