Bitcoin Forum

Paying 0.000001 or 0.000035 is just impossible to remember and use... nobody will use that in the future if we want it mainstream.
I know satoshi exists as smallest unit but they are quite hard to remember.
When someone says 10,000 satoshi I try to think how much is that while 1 BTC is easy to understand.
So maybe we should have new bitcoins to keep the name where 1 new bitcoin = 0.0001 old bitcoins to make it easier to use...
share your thoughts.

Maybe if it becomes widely used, or the only currency used, people will get used to it if they are using it everyday.  Maybe that is giving people too much credit with their math skills?  I am kind of used to what each value means, but who knows.

We can't just change Bitcoin so dramatically. I kind of want that too, but the blocksize limit is more important.

Nothing has to change on a fundamental level, just the output display of wallets and sites. Most of them offer that option already. I do think Satoshi missed a trick there. It would've been far simpler to do it from minute one. Average human psychology isn't programmed for piles of zeroes at the front.

this debate was already said last year..

the agreement was when transacting and the number of 0's starts giving people blurred vision.. people will start using 'bits'.. (0.000001 / 100sats)

trying to rename bitcoin as being 1.00000000 to being something else would cause more confusion. and also it would be like trying to call a gram of gold, a tonne

Basically this, it was discussed about a year ago and lots of people seemed to agree on using the mBTC (milli-bitcoin), or 0.001 BTC. It's sort of been the defacto-standard for a portion of a bitcoin for at least a year now.

the idea is if crypto fans use it is one thing but if we want bitcoin to go mainstream and be used everywhere nobody will know what 0.00001 means - let's think what this means for elder people for example

That is why the unit for 0.00001 is bits. For 0.001, it is mBTC. It is really simple, you just say "I have 20 mBTC" and people will know what you are saying. No need for a decimal point and a lot of zeros. Anyways, this site: http://youmeandbtc.com/bitcoin-converter/convert-btc-mbtc-bits-satoshis-usd/ is a handy site for converting between the various commonly used units of Bitcoin.

It took me a while to be easily able to convert satoshis to BTC in my head but I figured out a way for me to remember it and now I have it down pat.

I remember it as "trip zero ten k" in my head, or 3 zeros (000) before 10,000 (10k).

.00010000

That gives me a nice reference point right in the middle and was my "ahaa" moment. eureka..

Now I mostly find myself thinking of BTC as "a million satoshis" = .01, "ten million satoshis" = .1, or "100k sat" = .001

Now I like it this way and its the millibits/bits/bytes that confuses me.. Maybe I'm silly for thinking this way but it works for me..

i think that moving to millibits is just a temporal short term name.. its much easier to just drop straight to bits

EG if $1 = 0.0025btc right now.. far easier to just say it is 2500bits that way its a permanent measure..
after all people know that a tonne of gold can exist, they know a tonne of gold is impossible to buy unless your rich. so it makes sense to use smaller measures.

but these days people buy coins measured in grams that are affordable in small handfull amounts and it sounds good you have whole numbers of gold rather than decimals of ounces..
so it makes sense to get use to grams now as its starting to become popular although people are getting confused about the whole gram/ounce conversion.. many would have prefered to have just skipped to grams. that way there would be no transition and confusion at the moment

so it makes sense to skip the millibit to avoid that confusion and just go from 0.0025bitcoin to 2500bits.. for longevity sake

Remember 1st grade?  All this "dimes" and "nickels" and "quarters" and "dollars"?  It's a lot to remember.  Yet many kids are smart enough to use the system. 

Much easier is satoshis - millies - bitpennies - bitdimes.  1 millie = 100ksat.  A bitpenny is a million sat.  Learn to use them if you want to use publc coin. 

now your just trying to reinvent new names to spark new debate..

satoshi, bits, millibits, bitcoin.. thats all thats needed. but preferably satoshi, bits, bitcoin

I like bitdimes, bitpennies, and mBits in the public market.

Satoshi and bits are far too little amounts for practical use...

lol.. your not thinking of the big picture..

its kind of funny when you read all the posts of people saying the price of bitcoin is going to rise in the next 6 months and not long after its going to go sky high..

then you will see that bits is no longer "too little"

EG
right now 1cent =25bits
in 6 months 1cent=12bits..

give it less than 2 years, 1 cent will be 1bit

so i hope you realise it doesnt take 500 years for bits to become relevant measure.. as its almost here now

so dropping to millibits or dimes or bitpennies is just short term and confusing

oh and by the way.. dimes.. thats the dreaded words of american currency.. europeans asians, and many other countries do not use dimes. so lets try not attaching bitcoin to american trends..

You might think so, but in fact satoshis are already to BIG for some studies. 

For example, a Joule of energy is best valued in millisatoshis. 

There are also a whole bunch of altcoins worth very small fractions of a satoshi, some of which trade for thousands of Doge-satoshi. 

thats what i dont get about doge...
litcoins smallest measure 0.00000001 is called a coblee.. after the inventor of litecoin..

im not sure who invented doge.. but atleast dogecoin can be more creative.. EG 0.00000001=puppie, or pup :D

you just need to know if there's exist mBTC and uBTC , 1 mBTC = 0,001 and uBTC = 100satoshi if I'm not mistaken ,this really help a lot for few sites

Good points... if it's one thing BTC investing is teaching me it is the value of patience and the long-term.

I see, measuring joules in satoshi -  :o
I understand how alt coins can become dust, hehe but I need to look into those selling high.

It's interesting how everything BTC is volatile now, from the price to the core, to the culture. Slowly it will become solid and finite.

Haha was thinking this too... Dogetoshi at least, c'mon.

Or Scooby Snacks ;)

1.0=doge
0.000001=scooby-doo
0.00000001=scrappy-doo
:D

but anyway back to bitcoin.. a few years ago there was bitcents (0.01btc) but that very quickly became redundant and no longer used when the price of a whole btc went to $100 a coin..
people got confused pretty quickly that a bitcent was $1.. and now a bitcent (if people still talked about it) would be $4.. so confusing to try linking bitcoin to dollar measures.. and confusing to have all the temporary measures in the middle, rather than thinking long term (which isnt that long at all)

the best way is to remember them in satoshi directly, so don't say 0.0001 but 10k satoshi, don't say 0.0000035 but 350 satoshi and so on, much easy to remember

Yeah, and most of all, remember to never do what Amph tells you to do here.
Just as you don't buy a pizza for 1000 cents, you don't want to talk in satoshis. You buy a pizza for 10 dollars, that's it. Hence, 1000 satoshis is a wrong way to say 10 bits.
Satoshis should never be used to count above 99. Period.

u will be suprised how quickly a few days of hunger will force change, a lower numbered

coin ie 20mill was needed to set the fire going, this so called human psychology u talk of will

have to get with program, we all understand it clear as day

How is it not possible to work with and remember 0.0005BTC for example. I use this method since day one and find it to work very well for me. If you don't like it, then simply chance the unit in your wallet and you can use mBTC or whatever option you feel comfortable with.

bits it's better yes, my point was to use non-fractional numbers, if you want to use bits that's even better, i forget about it

Renaming it is a bad idea, that will lead to much more confusion. You can use dBTC (0,1BTC), cBTC (0,01BTC), mBTC (0,001BTC) or even bits, so that's not a problem.

Actually I'd like the whole community to ditch satoshis as a unit and start using bits instead. I hate how faucets count in satoshis. How I wish they'd start counting in bits  :-\

The reason why they don't is likely to be because, standing from a commercial point of view, "175 satoshis" sounds like more money than "1.75 bits". It's stupid but it's probably what is happening. Anyway, it's a pain.

These days almost everyone in the world walks around with a cellphone.... most of these cellphones have a calculator or it's a smart phone and people

can link to sites that can do the conversion seamlessly for them. We are going into a new era, where most things are done electronically. We should not

drop the Satoshi naming convention for two reasons :

1. It will kill Satoshi's legacy
2. Satoshi's gives micropayments it's meaning 

using satoshi as a unit is not hard IMO. and sending bitcoin in satoshi is easy to implement in wallets if necessary.
for instance, right now i can change my wallet to show all values in micro or mili bitcoin. and if bitcoin becomes that expensive that 1 satishi, 1000 satishi and so on become popular it is just a simple code that can be added to the wallet to use satoshi as input.

You think the units are way too smaller and we need to change it???
What if the price goes to $1M some day???
Will you still say that these units are worthless???
I guess people will start begging even for satoshis then, and they will even ask for miners' fee change... :P

This topic again?  I like the satoshi unit, it's easy to remember even in the 10K range.  I've said it before when this has come up, but I think it should either be BTC or satoshi.  Not bits or mBTC.  Those are just stupid and require an unnecessary conversion.

that is a problem for the possible future not now :)

i agree with The Pharmacist, i also like satoshi as a small unit and it is easy to use for small amounts from 1 satoshi to 100,000 and the bigger values can be used as bitcoin itself (like 0.01BTC) this no other unit such as bits,... are needed and it is easy to remember without any conversion.

Come on, what kind of cultural background are you from, to think that counting a "one hundred million" block is easier than successive divisions or multiplications by a thousand?
If you're Asian I can definitely get that you'd prefer to think of 1,000,000 "one hundred times ten thousand", because 10,000 is a scaling unit for you, but no, if you're from any European-related background you see a unit there: it's "one million". 10,000 on the other hand shouldn't seem like a block to you: it's "ten thousand".

1,000,000,000 : billion
1,000,000 : million
1,000 : thousand
1 : one
0.001 : thousandth
0.000001 : millionth
0.00000001 : dafukisthat
0.000000001 : billionth

Again it's true that 0.00000001 and even 0.0001 make sense as scaling units in Chinese and Japanese, but not in English.
And it's not just the metric system (otherwise I'd understand that English speakers might disagree) but the whole western numeral scaling system here.

if there is a wide adoption someday and this becomes a "problem" I think that using satoshis as a unit will be good enough. Perhaps by that time Bitcoin will have a high price, so it would make a lot of sense using satoshis as a unit.

Using the satoshi as a unit makes about as much sense as reading 97 as "four times twenty plus ten and seven" instead of "ninety seven" although you read 54 as simply "fifty four"*. It's just another way to fuck logic sideways. I'm not against foreign systems as long as they're consistent, but using a 10^3 scaling basis for everything and then jumping to satoshis out of the blue that's horribly unconsistent.

(* : Yes I'm making fun of the French language here  :-X).

I think it's clear that job is reserved for alts.
You can trade them and earn some money or just use have like very small portions of bitcoin..For example Doge coin can store very small values of BTC and you can easy
convert it to btc at exchange or shapeshift or others..
Only we must decide which alts are best for this job..
To have a choice is very important!

I know I am talking about the future, and that's my way of "criticizing" the OP that the units are all fine and should be used the way they are getting used these days...

i dont think so that it is a required thing to do right now as the worth is not too big right now

I use mBTC - smallest I need to worry about really is 0.01 mBTC which is less than a US penny.

BTC                               1
mBTC                         0.001
uBTC                    0.000001
Satoshi         0.00000001

To my knowledge than creating some new units and getting confused using the standard denominations is good

People will be confuse if we add more units especially new users, I am already used using this current one and adding more or changing it is going hard for me to remember again ,it took me a long time to memorize the current units much more if a new one is implemented.So let us not change the current it's better than what you are thinking of..

We need to get the whole block limit issue solved before converting Bitcoin into new units.

It's already been set up, whether or not people want to use other units is up to them, I don't know why there are people still trying to push for this, it makes no sense for the current volume of trade.

I'm not for creating any new units!
It is already good system Satoshi and Bitcoin, for all other measurement just use calculator.
 We have responsibility not to complicate things!

reading this post helped me alot to figure out how much a satoshi is compared to a btc in a faster way, thanks mate.

So what do we do when SegWit and other improvements turn Bitcoin into the crypto-currency gold standard, and it has had some major appreciations in value (like gold, now and in the not too distant future). Will we then see posts saying - lets have a new name, and the even-newer-bitcoin will be the equivalent of the original ( current ) Bitcoin.

I dont think so that we need to convert Bitcoins to new units, it is very simple to calculate the Bitcoins , you have to just remember that the 1 btc is equal to 10 million satoshi, thats it so what ever it comes divide by simple 10 million.

Yeah I'm doing the same. And if it becomes higher numbers I reverse the situation :

I'll say 0.1 bitcoin or 0.01 bitcoins and not 10000000 satoshis.

I don't think there is any need for changing bitcoin units: BTC & Satoshis are enough. If you pay a high amount, you refer to bitcoin, if you pay a low amount, you refer to satoshi... That's a all.

And if you really want you can use uBTC and mBTC but I find it confusing

I use my Mycellium wallet in uB, it shows me 100 uB for 0.01 BTC. It makes it pretty intuitive. I belive that as the value grows we can use satoshi units, that would be no problem.

no its easy to remember just use it more often.

1/10^8 is 1 satoshi,  1  zero then a comma and 7 zeroes and then a 1.

And work from there, after your eyes get used to it, it will be easy.

When bitcoin gets value appreciations, we will be forced to use the unit "satoshi". Because most least unit will eliminate confusing zeros. Bits (=100 satoshi ) also would be a nice choice.

No, you are not silly. Can't call you that because I'm thinking almost the same way. To me Bitocin is 100 million satoshis and everything else goes from this point.

And yes all those millibits/bits/bytes confuse me too. And I don't think we need to invent another unit (or a subunit) for the sake of convenience. Most likely it will be even more confusing.

we do not need to convert it into any new units as the price is not too big right now and its enough what we actually have now

Thank you, I'm on the same page.  uBTC and mBTC are silly and unnecessary.  Too many units, too much confusion, too much mental conversion required.  It's bitcoin and satoshis for me.

I personally don't see a need for converting to a new unit, we already have Mbtc and Ubtc, also, if you find those units easier to work with and you have a blockchain.info wallet then you can over the display to those units just go to account settings and display and then just change the bitcoin display to Mbtc or Ubtc

Prevention is always better....

Now (when price is not big), micro payments are not clear eg: $0.1 = 0.0002622
With big price, like 1 bitcoin is $10k, $1 = 0.0001 and $0.1 = 0.000001 all payments are going to be messy with more zeros.

I believe now itself we need shift to base unit satoshi as mBTC or uBTC are confusing to most of the peoples.

if we convert our bitcoins to a new one more units then it will make people confused and lots of time will effect in calculating the amount what he is getting or losing in daily basis those who are regular users.

We have the units, we don't need more names, only we need to use them. When you want to buy a car or something expensive you could use bitcoin as unit. If you want to send few dollars to your gambling account you could use mbtc or bits units. In fiat money we have different units, for example we use dollar (1$) or cents (0.01 dollar).

what you said is very correct, why this users wanted to go for new units for converting bitcoins when the available way of units are very clear, first of all this gambling sites have confused the units marking as uBTC and mBTC, it is really confusing when i saw this and i was always getting problem when converting this units.

Bitcoins and Satoshi is the best way of Units for Bitcoins.

i think you're maybe looking for bits as a unit.
1 bit is about the current price divided by 100 in cents. so if the price is 400. 1 bit is 4 cents , thats usually how i remember it

Use mBTC! I think it's easier to know how much it is and to remember the amount. We don't really need to make a new units, because we already have a lot of it.

Of course this is the obvious set of units to use.

Take a price in bitcoin:
move the decimal point 3 spaces to the right and you have the price in millibitcoins (mBTC)
move the decimal point another 3 spaces to the right and you have the price in microbitcoins (uBTC)
move another 2 decimal points to the right and you have satoshis

For some strange reason some people like to call a uBTC a 'bit', but there's really no need to add that new unit at all.

I don't really understand why we keep comparing bitcoin to fiat? In all honesty we all want bitcoin to stand on its own aside from fiat, spend it like it was fiat. I can see your point of how it does get confusing as we always try to rationalise how much something costs in real money. 0.00whatever works for me. If anything add more.

Satoshi's is my preferred unit of measurement for anything after the decimal point pretty much, much less confusing.

I don't even know what a satoshi is tbh and I've been in the bitcoin game for years now...

i think converting also not a best way..by saying satoshi is more easy to understand or maybe we can use mbtc or ubtc it will help..

This is simple and already discussed. You don't actually change anything, you just denote them differently. Currently I think the optimum unit is mBTC, or milibits (0.001) and is the primary unit on many if not most online bitcoin services.

You are right. In number system itself we have different notations (like hundred, thousand, million and billion), we must need different notations (BTC, mBTC, uBTC, satoshi and bits) for bitcoin system also.

Based on the volume we transact, we can choose an appropriate notation which has minimum zeros.

Bad Idea , there already exist a concept of mBTC and umBTC , so why to make new standards and confuse people.

I don't understand the reason of this discussion, since we already have satoshis, which is a pretty small unit to be used... Most wallets have the option to use this unit instead of BTC...

I disagree. What about in a couple years and the value has changed. Are we going to change it again?

I agree it's somewhat awkward now.

But satoshi is way too small. Satoshi works good for micropayments, but for example right now 40 dollars is about 0.1 BTC, so that's 0.10000000 or 10000k, not very intuitive since 40 dollars could be the price of doing some groceries.

Of course changing it is stupid, we will just have to deal with it and come up with mBTC or something.

than remember it in bits, it's the same, my point is to not use prefix for the smallest unit of bitcoin

That may indeed be a possibility. But I guess that's not going to happen so soon clear.
That is unrealistic. There may well be another unit.

i dont think there was some goods or service that have price between 0.000001 or 0.000035,i believe in future goods and service price will blow up,not that cheap,and we can't put bitcoin payment on small transaction,not that small i mean.