Bitcoin Forum

I'm wondering what the consensus is on this issue.  I'm not talking about a name for the unit, but rather which denomination is more ideal to use.

It seems like the main issue with this debate is whether or not the value of Bitcoin will 'outgrow' the .001 unit, just as we have 'outgrown' 1BTC.

What are your thoughts?

There's been a plethora of discussions on this. Consensus gravitated towards the following units:

.001              mBTC
.000001        µBTC or uBTC
.00000001    satoshi

I wish they'd alter the client as was done for the onecoin alt where you can set whatever scale of units you want to look at. Gaze in wonder at your millions of satoshis.

there have been quite a few topics on this, but i think to prevent confusion we just stick to BTC until we can go to Satoshi's

No, to get more investors we NEED to go to uBTC. The price is too high now for new investors. Normal people are scared now when they see the prices and don't understand that you also can buy 0.01BTC.

mBTC soon to reach dollar parity. Makes for quick and easy price understanding.

It's not too high.  If someone invests $100 a month, then that's 0.16 BTC right now.  So, what?  That's not too small.  The software libraries that we use have not written to put thousands separators on the right side of the decimal place:

The following Python code (after the needed import statement prints  "3.14159"
In QT:
locale = QLocale ("US")
print locale.toString(3.14159)

However 1000000 is printed as:
1,000,000

By default in both python, C, C++ commas are not put into the numbers.

The mu confuses people.

If you believe we should stick to BTC, vote other.

My prediction is that uBTC is just good enough. Just remember that there are only 12mil coins for 7 billion people. mBTC would be ok for now yes, but at the end we have to go to uBTC, so you better use uBTC now, so people can get used to it.

Only recently 1BTC was small enough. It's hard to move decimal places for people, we should try and do it as infrequent as possible. Better to go an order of magnitude smaller and save us from needing to do it again in a few years.

+1 i think that is better logic im with you rabbit  :D

I'm all for 0.0001 but agree that I'm in a minority group and soon everybody will be using mBTC.

mBTC is good enough why change ???

Because we have to change again when mBTC isn't enough also

I think that we should use satochis !!!

Because it's going to not be good enough so quickly. Once bitcoin gets to $10,000 even a mBTC is going to feel a bit expensive.

yeah uBTC and mBTC always get me confused... I like .00000001 BTC better

Exactly.  Non scientific folks get very nervous with things like 'mu's  even mBTC requires an explanation for most people.  The explanation gets them uncomfortable and they get suspicious.   Just give the fucking thing a proper name and get on with it.

'bitcoin' was the dumbest name anyway.  bitcoin is the name of the network and protocol.  The name of the currency unit should be something else.  Same for 'Satoshi' - second dumbest name ever.  Just do something simple and easy like 'Euro'; 'Yen'; 'Peso'.  Not everyone who uses this currency system is going to be a nerdy-giggling goofball who like cute silly names for everything.

i think you have to switch units.  paying $600 to get just one of something is a huge psychological barrier.  right now bitcoins are expensive, but if you move the decimal point they can become cheap.

OTOH I as a merchant would rather sell a notebook for 0.5 BTC (half a something) than for 500 mBTC (five hundred somethings—ouch).

Just do something like when displaying, and just keep the big text to anything greater than a dollar.

0.01123

or

0.01123

Or

11.23 E-3

or
11.23 x10^-3


I think the problem is just visualizing the count of digits into the decimal values.

Yeah, I know basing it around the dollar has issues, but people just are used to values roughly around a dollar, and it is nice to see when you are bigger or less than a dollar.

Introducing funny symbols that people aren't used to isn't going to help novices. This is a visualization problem.

112,300,000 Satoshis isn't really very difficult to visualize though. At least there is a breakdown with commas that make it easy to measure scales.

This could be another fun way of seeing numbers:

0.011'236'392

I can understand this much better than
0.011236392

and a fee on a transaction would be something like
0.000'1

I guess part of the problem is that in common situations, there has never been a reason to give easy to read long decimal numbers in the way that you have for large integers (we deal with values of one million much more often than one millionth). This is a reality to deal with in our case, and we just need a way to delineate orders of magnitude in a way that is very easy for users to see.

This is an identical problem to why this 19942347823 is much harder to process than this 19,942,347,823 (oh yeah almost 20 trillion, cool, I can get that).

The thing we don't want is a changing standard that people will need to keep getting used to whenever price swings happen (likely to be for the next 5 years).  mBTC, uBTC,... aren't going to cut it. I think people would be much more capable of dealing with the idea that they have to spend 100 million satoshis for lunch - though I so despise using a person's name as a unit of currency, especially a currency with the ideological underpinnings that bitcoin does. How we call them ints or bits or something. Anything but satoshis. I think he would be put off by such idolatry.

Ok, now I have the itch to make my bitcoin client display numbers like this: 0.011'236'392

Id prefer 0.001 over 0.0001 as the later is still quite low in value

Normal people. Who cares about them?  :P

Whats more, what kind of self-respecting investor would not understand the decimal?..

PrintCoins

I like your idea. ' ' ' '

I'm all for 0.0001 BTC. We need to just go with the half-way point. Room for growth, and fluid transitions within the system.

1 bitcoin = 10,000 digibits (or whatever)
1 digibit = 10,000 satoshis

And I agree that resorting to the next-lower denomination will get more people interested, as long as it's NOT millibit or millibitcoin or microbit, etc (I've encountered non-users mentioning such things quite a bit.)

Someone should fork Mycelium, call it KidCoin, add bright colors and fun imagery, and change the displays and inputs to only work in 0.0001 BTC units, except 1 BTC = 10,000 KDC. It would see overnight success.

(Edit: yes, that was exaggeration.)

If you haven't upgraded to the newest electrum try this one:

https://github.com/shawnpringle/electrum/releases/tag/1.800%2C000

You can use the Windows 'Control Panel' or in KDE's 'System Settings' to change which comma character you wish to use.

sdp

B-notation!

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=220322.msg4179591#msg4179591


It's short, clear, and flexible. Why do people insist on dragging on this debate when something as elegant and straightforward as B-notation exists?

Start at whichever decimal place makes sense, and represent it without confusion!

oh plz.  we don't buy stuff with gold at the store, we use dollars, duh.  each bitcoin is like a bar of super expensive platinum :D

Sad but true. Psychology plays a big role in this...Even though countless people will point out that nothing has changed accept how we record bitcoin, the fact taht it is a small number as opposed to X,XXX is WAY better.

Honestly, if we start having the "problem" of the bitcoin price being $850 uBTC...we all are getting congratulatory slaps on the ass.

If you look at it from the optimization point of view, one should optimize the common case.

Even at today's value, most daily transactions will have a "0." or "0.0" in front of them.

Larger transactions are less frequent, and the senders and receivers can afford to and should spend time checking over all the digits of the amount.

Anything less than 0.0001 is currently inconsequential (e.g. bitpay price quotes always seem to round to 0.0001)

All these zeros incur cost, and it adds up over time.

Shaking the 0., 0.0 and 0.00 off daily item value transactions would allow most users to consider only the digits that matter in the amounts.

This is why re-denomination is important.

I think mBTC is perfect at this point, but it will very soon be too big again.

Just stick to BTC - it doesn't really make any difference 0.001 BTC is easy enough to understand.

Companies constantly can't predict the future. Use satoshis now, pull the band aid now

Which is why I still say we should just go with a 0.0001 BTC unit and give it a new name.

This avoids having to move the decimal again too soon, and just adds consistency to the entire scheme (move 4 decimals each time, add 4 decimals any time we need to subdivide further.)

Plus, I again would suggest that many of us who are tech-minded seriously underestimate how much the average person (ok, maybe just the average American) struggles with the idea of a milliBitcoin or microBitcoin. It's just not user-friendly. Saying "a digibit (nakamoto, myriabit, etc.) is one ten-thousanth of a bitcoin" or "there are ten thousand digibits in a bitcoin, ten thousand satoshis in a digibit" would actually allow the convention to spread quickly and to stick.

All it would take is a decent name for the unit. Suggestions?

(Would it help if I offered a bounty?)

Printcoins has a valid argument. In general, merchants selling higher priced items (Such as Computers) would choose BTC or mBTC denomination while merchants selling lower priced products (such as coffee) would prefer mBTC or greater.

A large percentage of merchants, exchanges, etc... provide the price in both Bitcoins and Dollars and eliminate this confusion all together.

Suppose everyone jumped on the bandwagon for using 0.0001 and whatever cute name is proposed... No one has any idea where the value of Bitcoin will end up if/when it becomes widely used and somewhat stable. So why pick an arbitrary (negative) power of 10 and hope it becomes the most convenient, when in all likelihood, you'll have picked an inconvenient unit?

The other problem with trying to come up with a cute nickname at this point is that unlike traditional currencies (which are often limited geographically for day-to-day use), Bitcoin is a global currency to begin with, so whatever name is "chosen", it's going to be translated, mispronounced, and/or replaced anyway in various parts of the world. I don't think there's a whole lot one can do about "pushing" currency denomination nicknames - they arise and catch on (or not) organically and regionally as necessary to streamline popular use. They're not normally decreed or pushed by an authority, but rather emerge with common use. We (the supporters of a decentralized cryptocurrency) of all people should understand that.

In my opinion, this doesn't mean we can't or shouldn't encourage adoption of a specific symbolic representation of a currency's units and subunits. For that reason, I have and will continue to support the use of "b-notation". If you have a preference for units of 1/10000, then go ahead and use XB4. Other people may prefer XB3 or XB6, but it's straightforward and practical any way you look at it.

Satoshis. Now! I know it's hard for us to understand for many of us but I constantly experience this: when I explain Bitcoin, one of the first thing people say is "it's too expensive", no matter how hard I try to explain that 1BTC=800USD is just an arbitrary exchange, they see 1BTC as the "thing" you buy. Switching to Satoshis would solve the problem and would avoid to change it in the (near) future.

It's not arbitrary. It's the halfway point on an 8-decimal-point scale. It reduces the movement to satoshis down to 2 equally-spaced steps (and the "cute name" war was lost when the community, for whatever reason, went with "satoshis" as the name for the smallest unit.)



Yep, yet it was a deliberate push by enough supporters that made "satoshi" stick, despite detractors (of which I was one.)

If it can be done once, it can be done again. I don't really care what the name is (actually, I do have my preferences,) so long as there is one for the unit.



Most "non-techies" I know would consider it anything but practical. Sorry, but there's no way I'd ever advocate for it.  :-\