Bitcoin Forum

For the purpose of bitcoin adoption let's divide the world into four groups:

Community Founders (CF): these were the first miners and merchants.  These people got into bitcoin when bitcoin was worthless.  These people are few in number and by definition we have recruited as many of them as we are going to.

Savvy Early Adopers (SEA): these are the people that jumped in in the last two months.  Most of them are programmers, mathematicians, or engineers.  Most of them are libertarians of one sort or another.  These grognards are willing to put up with user-unfriendly software.  Most of these people have been recruited into the bitcoin community.  These people got in because they wanted bitcoin to succeed AND they believe that it has a chance.

Hip Young People (HYP): these are the people that read all of the recent articles.  They have gadgets and are comfortable with the internet.  Unlike the SEA these HYP are "tech savvy" but don't really know much about computers.  They have iPads and Twitter but are too scared to backup a wallet.dat.  These people are also not interested in bitcoin for its foundation in Austrian Economics, in fact they often progressives.  These people just want to be hip and maybe make online payments easier.

Regular People (RP): everyone else.  Many of these people think that we need the TSA in airports, want to censor the internet, think that young people just need to work harder, etc...

So why am I describing these groups of people?  Well we have to if we want to understand the price dynamics at work here.

The CF got into bitcoin for whatever reasons, often the same reasons as the SEA.  However the key difference is that the SEA were skeptical or hadn't heard of bitcoin.  When bitcoins were less than a penny you pretty much had to be an enthusiast to get interested.  Eventually bitcoins hit parity with the dollar.  Then people got interested.

Suddenly people like me (I'm a SEA) got interested.  I knew about bitcoin for two years but I didn't get involved because I believed that the government would shut it down before it got too big to shut down.  This group became interested in bitcoin because of the price point.  It was clear that serious money was backing this thing and that it had a chance.  This group has no problem with the decimal point.  We are comfortable enough with numbers smaller than one.  We can work with decimals.  We drove the price to $19 and then once media attention hit we foolishly drove it to $30, thinking that people would join in.

However all of the SEA are already in, now we have to recruit HYP.  If there is one thing I know about Hip Young People it is that they don't know math that well.  Most of them can't multiply fractions, much less add them.  Do you really think that they are going to understand that the price of bitcoin doesn't matter?  They saw that the price was $30 and decided that they couldn't justify spending $100 for a measly three coins.  These people would have paid $100 for thirty coins.  They would have paid $100 for three hundred coins.

Xbox live has points.  80 points cost $1.  Nintendo Wii has points 100 points cost $1  Isn't it logical to suggest that a bitcoin should be worth LESS than a dollar?  Wouldn't it be great if a bitcoin was worth $0.10?  Then one bitcoin would be an excellent "tip" for a website that you liked.  It would also be an excellent chip size for online poker, and you could download a song for 8 of them.  Maybe you could play a game online and each time you download a new part of the game you would send 3 bitcoins to pay for it.  No fractions, no decimals.

So... what am I proposing?  I am proposing that anytime the bitcoin hits one dollar the decimal point moves one place.  We would start by moving it two places.  We might never have to move it again if bitcoin stabilizes.  Even if it does keep moving it would just be a thing that people get used to.  If we do it would be built into the client by then and there would be a huge announcement screen when you opened up the client.

The simple reality is that people can't handle decimals, and that people would be much more willing to buy bitcoins that are worth less than a dollar that are usable for micropayments.  People are much more willing to use kilocoins than they are millicoins.

I believe that bitcoin is a fundamentally sound idea, but that it will languish until the decimal point is dealt with in a way that seems sensible for people who cannot understand math beyond the 4th grade level.  I believe that bitcoin will NEVER get to $100 (nominally), but that its value will continue to grow each time the decimal point is moved.

We need to make a new word for it though, a milibit is good?

We can't move the decimal place, thats too confusing

> We can't move the decimal place, thats too confusing

Why?

Right now the bitcoin community is small enough that we can make any changes we want and have it communicated quickly.  Then as bitcoin grows:

The bitcoin client(s) would clearly announce to the user that there has been a decimal place shift.  There would be a popup, a yellow banner at the top, and a warning message with each send transaction.

Shopping cart code would be aware of the shift and automatically update display prices.  It would also provide an explanation to the customer for at least a month.

> We need to make a new word for it though, a milibit is good?

Not likely to work.  Most people are not smart enough to understand decimal prefixes.  How can adding letters mean that something is worth less?  People can understand kilocoins but not millicoins.  Also if the unit changes people are likely to get confused and angry.  "Why are things priced in millicoins now?  Why aren't we using good old centicoins?  I don't trust this damn currency, I HATE MATH!!!!!!"

Also we don't have enough prefixes.  If for some horrid reason we go with SI prefixes we have to move three decimal places at a time.  So if we started that system when BTC = $20 we would end up with the unit of exchange being somewhere between $0.02 and $20.00.  That is way too much range.  We really need to go one decimal place at a time.

good thing there aren't 10 threads discussing this already

You didn't look hard enough if you think there are only 10.

We need more threads discussing this.  This is the issue.  Right now people are speculating (sort of bad) and day trading (bad) rather than saving (good) or trading (better).  Why?  Part of the reason is that there isn't an economy but there won't be an economy until we get some consumers.  We're not going to have an economy until bitcoin is consumer-friendly.  Regular "smart" (dumb) people won't use bitcoin until it deals with the decimal place.

I really don't have the time to write a new bitcoin client, and I probably don't have the skills (I'm a programmer but I'm rusty).  The only way that I can make this happen is by convincing you.  Once I have convinced you, then you can start a thread to convince others.  Once everyone is convinced the change is likely to be made.

The decimal place will move when the economy supports it. Right now, all the coins haven't been made, haven't been adopted, and aren't being circulated. The network is small (ish), and the decimal place helps mitigate scale.

Too small and micro-transactions become nogo (not an issue now).

Too big and olav's bot starts flooding with .00000000000000000000000001 transactions.

Come back when btc > $100 usd || users > 1M || iTunes song < .01 btc.

I agree that having more divisibility would be better, and decimals suck.

Betco.in shifted their decimal for poker and it makes games seem a lot more exciting since there are more "chips" in play.

You don't want to go too far and make people think it's worthless, though.

You have it backwards.  The economy will support BTC when the decimal point moves.  Bitcoin simply cannot attract casual users at the current price point.  Pricing things in decimals is insande.  A song should cost 10 BTC.


I completely agree.  I think that we need the guy who runs Betco.in starting threads on this forum.  I also agree that we don't want to make them worthless.  I believe that a bitcoin should always be worth at least a penny.  In order to be sure of that we should aim for a target of around 10 cents per bit coin.

Can you people take your own personal failings elsewhere, please?

If your ideas had any objective merit, the Japanese Yen and the Indian Rupee would rule the world, and everyone would be laughing at us with our huge, cumbersome dollars.

I guess you mean a song should be 10 satoshis, right?

Because...no song is worth 1/210000 of the economy. Might want to check https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/FAQ) for the scope on how it would work long term.

Finally, not many things are bought in the decimal, hence why it hasn't moved. Market first, then technology. Dick Tracy, then cell phones; Not cell phones, then Dick Tracy (and why hopefully you haven't named your son/daughter Dick).

bitcoin is not related to dollars, euros or gold. By moving the decimal place, there is an inference that it is.

Its not related to dollars, thats right, but its not practical to make 99% of the transacions for the goods we want to purchase with small decimal numbers.  If we dont shift the decimal point, we should at least come up with a good name for smaller denominations of Bitcoins, like Bitcents of something like that. I would advocate for short, easy words.

At the current all-time high for Bitcoin, there are roughly three million satoshi to the dollar... or 30,000 mikes.

Personally, if we're going to do anything with the decimal point, I'd rather jump straight to satoshi. We dealt with a 10,000-bitcoin pizza last year, we can deal with a 10,000-satoshi pizza next year.

It's millies and mikes then we win.

Related topics, regarding naming smaller denominations:

Bitcents?
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=7325.20

Our next denomination: UBC
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=10049.40

Shift the decimal point over?
http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13144.0

+1 for creating a decimal of a BTC as the new reference unit. Millibitcoin should be the way to go IMHO, the bitcoin world would be more appealing and "user friendly" if the average joe can get 500 MBTC for 10$ rather than 0.5 BTC.

ITT: Nerds do not understand simple psychology. Nothing new I guess, but shows that this community is still self-embracing and not very inviting to the outside world.

Dealing in decimal may be fine for super nerds and computers, but if we want this to be more than our secret tree house were we do things normal people don't get, then we need to make it more appealing to John Does.

One way of doing this is moving the decimal place.

begrudgingly agree with OP.

Not only do I agree but I found it very enjoyably written. Though I disagree that it would languish forever below 1000%, I think culture would eventually adapt to using decimals simply because it would be advantageous to each individual who 'gets over it'. Just that it would take longer. Probably long enough to be worth the technical cost of changing it.

And everyone that pops up suggesting this forgets that their proposed renormalization is just as arbitrary as the current one.  Are you suggesting that we keep changing the entire network every time the value changes by a factor of 10?

I agree with the op, that the decimal place should shift.

Perhaps this only needs to be a client UI issue tho - all transactions could still use the current decimal places, and just in the UI the user could switch between 'BTC' i.e. what we have now, or a more user friendly 'UBTC' or whatever we call it, which makes them feel richer and is perhaps easier to use in mental math, etc (and which is perhaps the default 'view').

just a thought

*edit* just did some reading, looks like others have already suggested just making it a simple client ui edit. seems the easiest way to go.

OP is right!

That is a valid question, but not one that makes this issue less important to deal with, but rather more so.

I suggest we should try to move the decimal quite a lot to make it "future proof", so for example, so that 1 standard bitcoin unit is what we today call 0.00001.

This is the only renormalization that is even remotely practical right now, and there is nothing stopping anyone from implementing it locally.

There is, since only a small percentage of us have the programming expertise to  'implement it locally'.

You could pay someone to make a new client, or to make a patch for the default client.  Bounties have been popular.

The point is that changing your local client to display mBTC or uBTC, or to allow switching between them, doesn't require that the entire network change instantly.

hello_good_sir, awesome analysis of the Bitcoin people involved.
It might be a good starting point of several issues, not just decimal shifting, which I do agree is important.

maybe try PMing Gavin or another developer with your concerns and see what their assessment is.  They seem to be very receptive to critiques, I'm sure they'll give you a thoughtful response.

I fall in-between SEA and HYP

I expect man others are in two categories

yep.

no prefix is going to solve this issue-- there should be NO decimals in bitcoins AT ALL. PERIOD.

A bitcoin should be the SMALLEST unit you can make, and people can deal in:

e.g.

10 bitcoins
100 bitcoins
600 bitcoins

1k bitcoins
100k bitcoins
600k bitcoins

1mil bitcoins
100mil bitcoins
600mil bitoins

1bil bitcoins
100bil bitcoins
600bil bitcoins

1tril bitcoins
100tril bitcoins
600tril bitcoins

people understand these numbers. People DO NOT, under ANY circumstances, understand fractions.

there are 210 trillion satoshis available. (American trillions. Note that euros have a different meaning for "trillion")

The currency should be changed so that:

1 bitcoin becomes 1 satoshi



Just change the meaning of what we currently call a bitcoin to what is currently called a satoshi.

Bitcoins and satoshis become the same thing and the problem will be solved. The public will understand, and will be excited to get their hands on 10, 100, 1k, 100k, 1mil, 100mil, 500mil bitcoins.

Fractions are poison for the currency.

Even Mt. Gox can't handle anything lower than 0.1, and I would argue that this isn't a technical issue, but more of a psychological one related to the decimal point.  A person should at least be able to buy as small amount of bitcoins as he can get at the exchange rate for the amount of dollars and cents he has in his Mt. Gox account, but currently, that is't possible. Once that other bug with fees on smaller transactions in the Bitcoin client gets worked out, I would argue that there should be no reason to force all trades on Mt. Gox to be higher than 0.1.

It is too late.  You will never get the network to agree to changing the fundamental unit.  Let me repeat that never.  For this to work, you would need to shut down the entire network, at once, for the big software update.  Will.  Not.  Happen.

Feel free to set up your local display for whatever floats your boat, but if you use the term bitcoin to mean anything other than what the rest of the network thinks of as a bitcoin, you are in for a rude surprise.

Nobody here wants to change the unit used by the network. We want to change the unit used by the GUI and, by that, the unit used by the humans using the software. There's no thecnical challanges to implement that, just a bunch of "*1000".

And about the name... not satoshi, please.

You will notice that every single picture of those random odd failing(?) currency units all have had to convert the decimals into "normal" numbers and give them a new name.

This is exactly what is being proposed here: keep the actual network the way it is, but change the way the GUI shows bitcoins, and what we understand as 1 unit of the bitcoin currency to something that is easier to comprehend.

The way it is now is contrary to how people usually deal with both numbers and currencies, and only serve to overcomplicate things.

Now before you argue that the numbers all add up, and decimals are just fine, then remember that you are someone who is used to technology, numbers and computer and whatnot.

We want this to be for more than the elite of computer users, right?

If we want this to be a currency for John Does too, then we need to make it more appealing and less robotic.

IDD,  a mil (and, by extend, millibitcoin) would be great.