Does IOTA become less accessible the further its value increases?

Question

Rounded, right now a single IOTA is worth around $0.0000024. Yesterday it was worth $0.0000015. If the MIOTA price goes up to $500-$1,000 as some people have been forecasting, this means a single IOTA will be worth $0.0005 to $0.001.

According to this article by Financial Times in 2013, a person's age, gender or location is worth $0.0005. Right now this means you could exchange 208 IOTA for a single piece of this data, but if the value of MIOTA goes up to $1,000 it would no longer be possible to purchase an odd number of this data: 1 piece would be worth 0.5 IOTA, 3 would be 1.5, and so on.

Are value increases a problem for IOTA? Is there a plan for how to resolve this in a future where the IOTA price may exceed certain thresholds?

Answer 1

To your point, one IOTA is currently the smallest possible increment of supply.

If IOTA increases in value to the point where microtransactions and streaming real time payments become infeasible, the developers have clarified that they will add smaller denominations of IOTA. As IOTA doesn't work well with decimals, they will dilute the supply. By that, I mean that they will increase the supply by multiplying everyone's holdings by a certain number -- per Come-from-Beyond: "Current plan is to do an equivalent of a stock-split to change the supply from (3^33-1)/2 to (3^81-1)/2."

If they do this, no value will change in anyone holding IOTA but everyone will suddenly have far more units to work with.

Source: https://iota.stackexchange.com/a/212/19