Bitcoin Forum

The human mind is accustomed with the powers of 10 system for quick daily calculations:
 - money 1 cent, $1, $1k
 - distance 1mm, 1cm, 1m, 1 km
 - weight 1g, 1kg, 1t
 - math (1%, 100%, easy to divide, multiply, add by 10 or 100, etc.)
 - human behaviour (on a scale of 1 to 10, how would rate ...)

... sorry for imperial folks :p

The common ground of all the examples above is that we can easily "visualize" and calculate values between 10^-3 and 10³ for things.

How is this related to Bitcoin?

The same way as Zimbabwe dollars (they had a 100 trillion dollar note) distorted the concept we have about $1k or $1mil as money, the deflationary BTC will make it harder for people to comprehend the meaning of a 0.000152 BTC transaction fee for example. When you start counting the zeros no matter in which direction, something is not right.

Assuming that BTC eventually gains in value because is a limited quantity, why use the BTC 10⁰-10^-8 range and not the 10⁴-10^-4 BTC range for what is expected to be the bulk of the transactions made.

Solution: implement a 1:100 split.

The real problem here is that splitting is impractical and not forcible. It will cause too much confusion. What we need to do is, add on as many decimal points as possible ASAP, so people can get accustomed to using whatever is the unit that creates integer values. Widespread usage of "Satoshi" as the unit for 10 nBTC is a horrible thing due to the inevitable confusion.

152 uBTC.  Very small.

Well you just pointed out the solution (and no it isn't something as dubious as a 100:1 split).

mBTC. ("millibits")  & uBTC. ("microbits")

0.000152 BTC = 0.152 mBTC or 152 uBTC.  The reference client already supports this.

Then we should refer to the mBTC as THE BTC coin and the wallet should list the mBTC as the coins contained. Meaning if you have 0.5 BTC you see 500 in your wallet.

But this is missing my point. Do not think about this issue from a pure technical or mathematical solution. Yes, I am aware we can go down to 8 digits.

Think about it from a Bitcoin mass-adoption perspective. Businesses, merchants, "regular" buyers and sellers are not used in calculating and dealing with 0.00xxx prices. I strongly believe that it would help Bitcoin adoption if most of the transactions will be priced in that sweet spot range of 10^-2-10⁴.

If you are using the standard client, you can already set it to display mBTC or even μBTC. So just set it in the way that you are the most comfortable with.

Solved!

The solution is not a setting for the value is displayed in the client. It's should be a "setting" for how the coins value is displayed/perceived in Bitcoin transactions.

Other threads about this:

From June 2011:
Shift the decimal point over? (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=13144.0) (with poll)
Solution: How to shift the decimal (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=13495.0)

From September 2012:
Move the decimal place! (Is it possible?) (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=109476.0)

Thank you.

Seems the other topics ended up into the same technical discussion that I was trying to move away from. It's hard to make all the engineers and programmers here understand the importance of UX and user-friendliness in anything you build as hardware or software. Here's the cold truth: if you want the average joe to embrace your solution, you need to make it easy for him to understand and use it.

Apple can be a good example, although they excel in both but still ... all my iPhone-users friends name user-friendliness (I see it as technological-challenged-people-friendliness) as the main reason they bought the phone and no matter how much I try to show them that some Android phones have actually better hardware, larger screen and even better software (HTC sense comes to mind) they won't budge. However I won't short AAPL stock any time soon because there are more of them out there than more of me.

What is the difference between saying that will be 12,000 mBTC (where total # of mBTC is 21 billion) and saying that will be 12,000 BTC (where total # of BTC is 21 billion).

Right now things are priced in BTC because most items are full and fractional BTC (i.e. 200 BTC, 1.245 BTC).  If the value of BTC rose to a point where 1 BTC was worth say $832 most items would be priced in mBTC.

"How much for that new Steam game?"
"24 mBTC".

So your logic seems to come down to the fact that people could accept 24 BTC but can't accept 24 mBTC.  Do people also have a problem with the concept of pennies?   If someone tells you he has 500 pennies are you totally confused and say "dude how much is that in dollars, my brain is so primitive I can only handle one unit at a time".

People don't use mBTC right now because there really is no need to.  Most products and services are either in full or high fractional BTC.   If/when BTC rises to a point where that isn't the case it is trivial for websites and merchants to start displaying prices in mBTC instead. 

There is no need for a massively disruptive (and likely impossible to implement) protocol change.  Today you can start pricing things in mBTC if you feel it makes more sense.  If enough people agree mBTC will become the defacto method of pricing goods & services..   

Here is an example:
"If you admit your plan is stupid I will give you 50 mBTC.  Just send me a Bitcoin address".

But why I can't set it to show cents? I mean, usually we use cents, not millies.

Here's the difference: we are building a new currency called Bitcoin, not mBitcoin.

Will you enforce a way for merchants to display prices in bitcoins? mBTC? uBTC? Look at how the prices are displayed everywhere; do you see prices like: this item costs 723 pennies, or here, big offer on the new car, only 22543650 m$. There are reasons why the decimal point is used the way it's used and I've already touched upon some of them.

I have seen products advertised as 99 cents, strangely there wasn't mass confusion.   If mBTC becomes common place it won't confuse users either.   Especially if/when BTC is worth >$1,000 USD:BTC.  It will simply make more sense for user to subconsciously think of 1 mBTC = $1.20 or $1.38 or $0.92 the it will to think of 1 BTC = $1,200, $1,380 or $920. 

A 100:1 split would require a hard fork.  You can do it today but without 90%+ support for miners, merchants, users, developers it isn't going anywhere.  It simply isn't going to happen.  I think the public isn't as stupid as you make it them out to be.

Would YOU be confused if someone wanted to sell you a game for 1,800 mBTC?  I find it annoying when people are smart enough to understand something yet assume "those other people" are too stupid to get it.

Enforce?  Who would have the power to enforce something like that?  The presumption is that vendors will mostly follow SI.

it be simple if compared to $:    1btc=1000satoshi=1000$ yeah 1btc=1000$ in 2016????

i earn 3btc a month=3000satoshi then i can buy a bread for 2satoshi or take my girl out for diner an pay 80satoshi

this is how i at the moment explane it to my noob friends, i know it isn,t the truth but they understand the point. :D :D :D

 

Exactly, so there will be some confusion when some sites display prices in BTC and some in mBTC. You need to pay attention to see what small letter there is in front of the BTC, is it "m"? is it "u"? somebody said something about "n".

I still see no valid arguments for not doing or at least considering doing a split (except the technical one presented by d&t). For the sake of Bitcoin adoption I hope I'm wrong and you guys are right.

Well, since we are talking about factors of 1000, I think that the proper SI prefix should be obvious in most cases.  As in, I'm sure you can tell the difference between the cost of a bottle of beer, a used car, and a luxury mansion without too much effort.

P.S.  Hundreds of threads on this topic, and this one doesn't seem to have added much, if anything, to the discussion.

Wow that is the argument.

Lets pretend dollars used, $, K$ ($1,000 USD), and M$ ($1,000,000).

You honestly think people will be confused when they see for example some new celebrity mansion is $M 3.2.  What?  That mansion is only 3 bucks.  Dude I am going to buy 100 of them.  Or they see a candybar marked $1.2.  "What a ripoff that candybar is more than a I make in a week".

Okay, so maybe you are right, and hardforking the entire blockchain at a cost in technician and website-author and account and so on hours of only a few hundred bitcoins per merchant for small or maybe even middling sized merchants is a great idea and works really well to enhance popular acceptance.

The public rejoices, a hundred million bitcoins (our current bitcoins, called what, kilocoins or something by your plan?) are bought at Mt Gox that weekend and...

Oops, wait, there are not a hundred million bitcoins in existence! Price rises so the 1200 million bucks pouring into Gox can actually buy coins.

Speculators see bitcoins just jumped 10 to 100 times in price, they jump in with a couple billion dollars as soon as the banks open on monday.

Oops, who the heck is crazy enough to sell bitcoins when they will be worth 10 to 100 times as much tomorrow? Price jumps another three of four orders of magnitude.

Even the not so wildly speculative can hardly miss seeing the headlines. Half a trillion jumps in when the banks open tuesday. Holy cow your house is worth less than a bitcoin! Oh wait, even in your new hard forked way of doing decimals it is worth how many millibitcoins by friday?

Time to implement a weekly hard-fork until all six billion people on the planet have a few grand of that week's new denomination so they don't feel their life savings look pathetic as less than a whole whatthefucktheycallitthisweek?

Oh wait, seven billion people. Price rise again...

-MarkM-

Yawn.  Liked this argument better the first thousand times I read it...

Not sure if you are saying the cost of having everyone hard fork every week is not a problem, we should hard fork often to keep up with fads in whether to use decimals at all or whether it is more fun to all be millionares or whatever?

Or that you agree a thousand times over thus it is very boring that the same obvious objection to an pathetically stupid Frequently Proposed Idiocy has to come up a thousand times due to Frequently Proposed Idiocies being so very frequently proposed...

-MarkM-

Got sidetracked; that is not the main argument. The main argument is people seeing prices like 0.00231 or 0.00097 which is not right because they are not "transaction-friendly" (for a lack of a better word). They are not transaction friendly because the way we are used to deal with the power of 10 in our daily lives. This is the argument.

And it seems I'm not the only one thinking like this.


@markm
I don't know what you are talking about there ... A split can be as simple as community agreeing that the mBitcoin is THE BTC and display all transactions accordingly in the wallets, mining software, ecommerce sites, etc. Already mined bitcoin will just be displayed as x1000 (if we are to use the mBTC example). What has Mgox and speculators has to do with anything?

"The community" isn't going to do anything as instantly as that would require. Just use whatever name you like for 1/1000, eventually one or more will catch on and be the de facto base unit.

At Seals we use 'chips' to mean 1/1000.

This isn't a real problem because people can solve it easily when and where it matters.

You're right, it isn't a problem, it's more like a "nice to have" than a "must have". I can also see that this kind of change is not something that's easy to do. But I am still convinced that having prices and assets displayed in that range is good for Bitcoin adoption.

I agree with this. I do hope that we will use some other notation than mBTC and uBTC though. Putting a prefix in front of the currency code looks very akward to me. Would be much nicer to have a separate symbol for "millies" or whatever we choose to call them (like $ and ¢ for dollars and cents).

But actually, it might be easier to reach a consensus on the symbol for "millies" than it has been for Bitcoin. ฿, Ƀ or whatever it is. :)

This made me laugh.

Cents is from the latin centi, meaning one part in 100.  We just don't call them centidollars because after hundreds of years, the word has been worn down to a stub.

Not sure that I get your point here. I do know that cent means one part in 100, just like milli means one part in 1000. My point was that we don't write cUSD, we write '¢'. We write 14¢ and we might write 0.14 USD if we use the currency code but we don't write 14 cUSD (I'm not american so correct me if I'm wrong).

I don't think that I've ever actually used the cents symbol even once in my entire life.  I rarely even write the word cents, usually opting for something more like $ 0.14.

Also, keep in mind two things.  First, dollars were around for hundreds of years before the concept of a "currency code" was ever imagined.  And second, the world has effectively never seen a deflationary currency before, meaning that we've never ever needed more precision in a currency, always less.

Lets be traditional and very British about it!

Don't write 1.030010 BTC, instead write B1,30m,10p! One coin, 30 millies and 10picos, maybe colloquialised to one coin 30 mils and sixpic, or even what the heck call the pics pence?

After all, all this silly decimal stuff is just silly nerd stuff, new pence was a funnymoney scam, not one coin of it real sterling silver fergoshsakes!

People managed with pounds, shillings, and pence for how long, and all of a sudden they can't handle coins, millies, and picos?

What is the world coming to!?!?!

-MarkM-

Micros, not picos. Or as people already mentioned here "mikes".


I think we all can agree that OP is just somewhat uneducated and stop beating the dead horse.

Also, um, 152×10^-6.

Or, maybe 1.52E-4

Ok, pence it is, since millies and micros both start with m and we don't want any silly non-British (ahem Roman, but who cares) alphabets! :)

-MarkM-

µ=micro
m=milli
so not both starting with "m"

Roman has a "u" ? :D :D

-MarkM-

The capacity of 1 Farad is so large that all involved in electronics get accustomed to use microFarads and nanoFarads. No problem.

Very good example, nobody is talking about Farad in electronics and everyone is just totally used to microFarads so that is normal.

Another good example is Bell, nobody used Bell because its just to huge, Decibel is the "normal" unit.

And everybody else out there are engineers in electronics or looking to become one ... Problem solved.

M (μ), indeed, is commonly used alongside Latin alphabets. See this Wikipedia page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-).

Ah, M as distinct from m? So we would write B1,30m,10M for 1.030010 BTC?

I don't like it, as capitals "seem bigger than" lowercase, and having a "bigger" symbol for the "smaller" unit just seems gauche / uncouth / potentially misleading to small children / unaesthetic.

Compare Lsd for pounds shillings pence vs LsD for same. Awkward. Unintuitive.

-MarkM-

Heh, no, and no.

In Greek, the letter mu is written either as μ (lowercase) or M (uppercase).  Since it is the first letter in the Greek word μικρός (micro) it has been adopted as the SI prefix for 10^-6.  It is common to just use u instead of μ when writing with a latin character set (like ASCII).  M (uppercase) is still used for Mega (10⁶).

And no one would ever suggest that silly notation you made up.  1.030010 BTC, or 1030.010 mBTC, or 1030010 μBTC.  In metric, it is pretty much unheard of to mix powers like that.  No one writes 1 Kilometer, 30 meters, 10 millimeters, they pick an appropriate scale and go with it.

Yeah I know that, but since the entire thread is about making up stupid and possibly arbitrary newfangled notations I figured I might as have a go at it myself.

Plus, mine does not even require forking the blockchain!

Though I guess if this is really all about making up excuses for forking the blockchain, I suggest we use 128-bit numbers to get rid of the stupid 8-decimals restriction, and use binary coded decimal math libs, and use three fields for value so we can code Coins, Millis and Micros right into the blackchain as distinct fields.

Oh and while we are at it, I'd like a few million coins for me coded into the genesis block.

-MarkM-

Eventually, the blockchain should migrate to floating-point numbers (X*10^E) as to future-proof it. Proper restrictions on the exponent such as to avoid obscene values of X would be necessary, but could be changed in a decentralized manner. This will, however, require a blockchain fork.

holy crap.

I wish death and taxes would send me mBTC for telling him I had stupid ideas...

I share your view, the current conventions are foreign to Joe Average and are a hurdle to mainstream adoption.
A single BTC is already too "expensive" to him and calculating in fractions smaller than 1/100 is a challenge. This is why stocks often perform well after a split, and why calculating with percentages is the mathematical event horizon to him.

The way to make this kind of change happen is however not trying to get buy-in from engineers.

What might work is a popular service that brands a name and a split, like the mentioned chips on seals.

I can't believe nobody has mentioned "tonal" units yet https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tonal_Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Tonal_Bitcoin). Even Luke-jr was spruiking that one like mad ;)

Seriously though, I can't believe this argument has gone on longer than a page. After D&T pointed out K(thousands), Mil(millions), Bil(billions) etc. is commonly used to express values of regular money the argument should have effectively ended.

$1 today according to CPI is equivalent to $0.04 in 1900 (yep, I know CPI is far from perfect). That means that $1 today would have bought $25 in old money. Coincidentally, BTCs are worth $25 in mtgox as of today, so you are really using the equivalent of your ancestor's dollars, and they worked just fine for them, and they didn't even make half penny coins at that point.

Much of bitcoin's value is currently propped up by speculation and not true economic activity. Since it is speculation, the general consensus is that the future value of bitcoin will continue to be $25, otherwise if people believed it would be worth $30, than it would be worth $30 today. My belief is that once it becomes a more common currency for real economic flows, it will drop in value as velocity is a major factor in money value, and any drop will cause a massive devaluation.

In other words, don't worry about bitcoins being valued so highly that we have to sit there counting decimal places by 5 or 6 digits. It is unlikely to ever be a problem, though it would be a problem we would all like to have.

Even at $30 I think a lot of hoarders would continue to hold... I know I will.
I think $100 is a fair point to stabilize at.... once its there for a little while the hoarders will start to sell.