Quote Originally Posted by Ladon View Post
It's very likely performance related. They'll be able to make the database more efficient by only having to store and retrieve smaller values. Reducing the significant digit by 1 for something accessed as much as virtual currency can result in huge overall processing gains.
wrong, a 32 bit number holds 4,294,967,295, and putting numbers into memory smaller than the bitness of the processor is actually a performance hit, please stop pulling stuff out of your crack