Bitcoin Forum

Today what we call one 'Bitcoin' is made up of 100 Million Satoshis. This makes most transactions total less than one full Bitcoin, and makes it hard for innumerate users to conceptualize and communicate about portions smaller than .01 BTC. This has led to current proposals and conventions for naming sub 1 BTC units, which all involve prefixes to the word 'Bitcoin', or unique names like the Finney or Satoshi. All of these result in multi-syllable words that increase Bitcoin's linguistic transaction cost, and for this and other reasons make the ecosystem harder than it needs to be to learn about and to use. A more elegant and smoother convention would be as follows: Switch the names of one Bitcoin and one Satoshi, and use existing common and slang names for the powers of ten, chosen from the most widely used languages.


New naming convention:

• 100,000,000 One Full Satoshi of Bitcoins Like a brick of gold. Originally named the 'Bitcoin' until massive growth forced a renaming of units.
• _10,000,000
• __1,000,000
• ____100,000 One Lakh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lakh) Pronounced "Lack". A unit in the South Asian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand, widely used both in official and other contexts in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is often used in Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan English.
• _____10,000
• _______1000
• ________100
• _________10
• __________1 One Bitcoin the smallest unit, in context simply referred to as a 'coin'. Originally named the 'Satoshi' until massive growth forced a renaming of units.

That is the core structure of the proposal. Before you reject it out of hand based on how different it is to what you have learned, how it turns our current convention upside down, please remember that for every one of us that uses the ecosystem now, hundreds and then thousands of others are likely to use it in the future. For them there will be no effort involved in switching, they will simply learn a much more intuitive system that humbly fits into existing habits of speech rather than demanding entirely new ones. This is the change to make, and now is the time to make it.

This naming convention scales to the moon. Stay with me now...

More than a billion people are already intimately familiar with using Lakhs to conceptualize currency units of 100,000. And not just the billion in South Asia, but traders anywhere who do business with South Asians are likely to have heard the phrase "one lakh Rupees". If you do not know how ubiquitous the word's usage is, and especially for currency, just ask around, it will not be hard to confirm.

One Lakh Rupees (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XWp3CXtM1OE). One lakh Rupees is probably about enough to buy the Indian made motorcycle he is sitting on when it was new, for perspective.

We all know that the naming conventions are fully arbitrary. We roll our eyes and sigh when people tell us Bitcoin can not possibly be a good deal at hundreds of dollars for one single coin. But even with full awareness of this, it is easy to understand how much less attractive the prospect of buying .0016 BTC for $1 USD worth of one's currency is than spending the same $1 on a full Lakh of Bitcoins. Or $10, or even $100. You are getting a WHOLE Lakh of Bitcoins!

By making the ecosystem easier to talk about it becomes easier to use. Which is how this semantic stock split will make all the little Bitcoins more valuable, as well as every full Satoshi.

If you are still not convinced do one last thing for me, say out loud, thirty times in a row, "Mil-E-Bit-Coin". Go ahead, say it. Thirty times. Are you annoyed?

Then say "Lakh" thirty times. Now imagine that multiplied by a billion users multiplied by thousands of days.

As far as names for other units, 'Crore (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crore)' is used for ten million by the same billion or so speakers who use Lakh. And of course 'grand' is a widely used single syllable word for one thousand. The addition of those two would limit the jump between any two units to two orders of magnitude, except for 1-1000, which is three, but those are the three that people are used to dealing with. The result would be a much easier to understand ecosystem.

It will be interesting to find out what other single syllable common or slang words there are for the powers of ten in other widely used languages.  

EDIT:
There needs to be no central agency to enforce anything formal. This proposal needs only to overcome the initial friction from current users resistant to change. It is much more intuitive and could win consensus and become the standard in a short amount of time if even a sizable minority got behind it, because it simply makes far more sense than "coins" that costs thousands of dollars, or ridiculous seven syllable Hun-Dred-Ki-Lo-Sa-To-Shi units. Holdouts will be quickly outnumbered by new users, who will overwhelming adopt the simpler system, if given the choice.

One of the properties of Bitcoin that was essential in it's initial adoption as a unit of value was a property that it shared with the earliest forms of currency, that of collectibility.

Nick Szabo (http://szabo.best.vwh.net/shell.html) (emphasis mine):


The concept of one coin being 100,000,000 of the smallest unit in the Bitcoin network was fine when users were able to collect multiple coins, but from here on out the majority of new users will own less than 1 BTC. The conceptual nature of a coin makes it far more compatible with being the smallest unit, the grain in the granularity, at this point and forward in Bitcoin's adoption than some arbitrary unit 10⁸ times higher, that most will never even see. At this point the coin in Bitcoin is no longer small, and transaction amounts can happen entirely three places to the right of the decimal, units who's value are no longer easily able to be approximated by simple observation.

People's instinct will be triggered much more strongly to collect something that they can have many of, than something they can only have a portion of, even though this is to a degree irrational, since the purchasing power is the same.

For reasons of evolutionary psychology going back thousands of years, the end of the S adoption curve for Bitcoin should be verbally similar to the beginning, with units of 50 coins being a normal, in scale number of coins for the average user to acquire.The effort in transitioning will pay off in short time in reduced linguistic transaction costs and extra adoption from increased collectibility.

No.

The problem is there is no central agency of weights and measures for Bitcoin.  So lets say some people adopt your provision and some don't.  You would see people saying "selling my steam game for one million Bitcoins" and other people being utterly confused as to why someone would be willing to pay close to $1B USD for a video game.  You can't force everyone to use your (or any) naming system, so any naming system which attempts to revalue a Bitcoin is dead before the author finished writing it.

    100,000,000  One Bitcoin
    _10,000,000  Ten MEGAtoshi
    __1,000,000  MEGAtoshi
    ____100,000  Hundred KILOtoshis
    _____10,000  Ten KILOtoshis
    _______1000 KILOtoshi
    ________100 Hundred Satoshis
    _________10 Ten Satoshis
    __________1 One Satoshi

The only ones that are remotely agreed about are a Bitcion (1e1) and a Satoshi (1e-8). Though satoshi is just really slang.

The metric system naming convention doesn't need to be reinvented and works quite well. In fact, most kids should have learned them all by the 5th grade. Maybe 9th given that some public school children learn really slowly, but they still learn them. I can't vouch for other countries, but seeing as the US is bottom of top 25 in math, there's at least 20 other countries that should understand it just fine as well. Scratch that we slipped outside the top 25 this year to 31st. hahaha. So there's a few more countries in that list above us. 

EDIT: Added to OP

oooh! I like this one....

Where does finney fit in again? I forget...

Somehow I think colored coins will determine bitcoin naming conventions as well. They will be able to assign arbitrary amounts of bitdust to represent what will one day be commonly used B^2 currencies.

I think we will end up with a whole ton of names in each country for the same thing in the long run  heck it may even regionalize terms  ;)

i like this one as well.  kilotoshi.  :)

I propose using microbitcoin as this would make it appear you get more when buying bitcoin with dollars. And a microbitcoin has 2 decimals, just like most other currencies.

I don't think most people will even be trading in Raw Bitcoin except brokers soon. Colored coins will be the normal currency and they will have a Bitcoin size of BTC0.0000543. Unless that minimum dust transaction limit plans to be changed soon, we should have a naming contest for that as it will be the basis of all colored coin creations. I'm still not clear if that is also the bottom for colored coin transactions themselves or not.

The need is clear, but redefining 'Bitcoin' right now (especially swapping its meaning with 'Satoshi') would be like trying to change the side-of-the-road a country drives on. It'd require massive consensus and synchronization to avoid confusion and loss.

I have a proposal based on coining a new term for µBTC. More details are in a sibling thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=515405.msg5774811#msg5774811

Cheers, jeers, and all other kinds of reactions welcome.

1 finney = 0.0001 bitcoin = 10000 satoshis

I think I can finally admit that I really liked that name.

1 satoshi should be 1 bitcoin, 1 current bitcoin = 100 million bitcoins

I know this obviously isn't going to be a thing because it's "confusing", but I would just prefer to call them dollars (I do in my mind). Dollars, Cryptodollars, C-dollars, Bitdollars, whatever the appropriate name somebody can think of and agree on. If I would say I placed a 125 dollar buy order on mintpal to buy Xcoin, it should be obvious I'm not talking about US or Canadian or Australian dollars, because Mintpal is a place in the cryptoworld and not in New York or Toronto or Sydney. Nobody in Canada gets confused when someone at the convenience store says, that will be 5 dollars please, unless they are a fucking moron. And if someone did want to sell something for USD in Canada, then they would simply clarify: that will be 5 US dollars. Let me clarify again, that I understand that this kind of system has flaws and why it might confusing unless it was universally recognized, but it just works fine for me personally.

1.00000000 - 1000 dollars
0.10000000 - 100
0.01000000 - 10
0.00100000 - 1
0.00010000 - 10 cents
0.00001000 - 1
0.00000100 - 100 satoshi
0.00000010 - 10
0.00000001 - 1

I neither want an American nomenclature nor an Asien.
So, neither Dollar nor Lakh is acceptable for me and most other people in Europe.
Bitcoin is a global currency. Keep that in mind and don't refer to what you are used to, when dealing with fiat in your country.

People learned what Byte, MB, etc. is. People will learn the nomenclature of Bitcoins.

I like that.

You are missing the point.

The important factor is the semantic re-basement, the terms used for the powers of ten can vary over time and geography. 

The human instinct to hoard collectibles has driven the adoption of Bitcoin. For this to continue to be a strong driving factor, the amounts that typical new users are able to acquire should be referred to as full "bitcoins". At this point anything from 1 to 100,000 satoshis would work, but the smaller units scale farther into the future, if we assume further S-curve adoption.

Lakh is just a good term to refer to units of 100,000 of anything, because it is a simple single syllable term, and is already familiar to many people.

I think Mega is more familiar to people. Lakh is just familiar to Asian people and not an international term, that is used by everybody, who has a computer.
So, stop forcing terms into the bitcoin world, just because it is used in your country. I don't care, what population your country has, so you can say "it is already familiar to many people"
It is not gonna happen.

In English: A "lack" of money is a strong negative.
You might get more support if you edit that part out.  ;)

The problem is that 100 million satoshi to a bitcoin is not logical. Should have been 1 million or 1 billion. This makes no sense at all. So before you do anything you should either cut two zeroes or add one.

I never understood, why they made that decision. Maybe some veteran Bitconar could explain?

Because it accounts for future growth of the world economy including inflation in the future since no future supply can be created it needed to go into Quadrillions :)

You misunderstood my question.
I wonderer why they made the decisision to use this 100.000.000 step. Normally you would use steps of 1.000 (like in Mega or Giga), but they decided to make steps in 100 (?). We don't even use this System. We use µBTC which is 100 Satoschi but 1.000th of 1 mBTC which is 1.000 of 1 BTC.
This 100 step to come from Satoschi to µBTC doesn't fit.

The limit of 64 bit int.

The Limit of int64 is 9.223.372.036.854.775.807(signed) or 18.446.744.073.709.551.615 (unsigned)
http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer_(Datentyp)

+1

This is a good system that lets people feel they have many units in their wallet without turning the nomenclature upside-down. Very Doge.

I think most people are used to the first 3 here and they would fit quite well:

100,000,000  One Bitcoin
_10,000,000  Ten Cent(s) (abbreviation of Ten Bitcents)
__1,000,000  One Cent (abbreviation of One Bitcent)

Then theres the next 3, which need to be named. Most people have adopted milli bitcoin (mBTC) for 0.001 BTC, others think this may cause problems regarding adoption and pricing. However, since I split it in parts of 3, there can be One - Ten - Hundred Blocks (with the Bitcoin as the 100 Cent replacement as it's the currency name. This is done with most currencies like the Dollar, the Euro etc. if you look at the decimals that are used when shopping. It's 2 decimal places and then most of the time the currency name as "one full unit", which is made of 100 of the lowest amount people usually pay with).
So what we'd need here is a unique name with preferably no more than 2 syllables. "milli Bitcoin" is way too long even tho you could just call is "One Mill". I know the finney is supposed to be 10,000 Satishis but it hasn't been adapted yet. Using the finney for 1,000 Satoshit instead would provide everything needed. It would look like this:

____100,000  Hundred Finneys
_____10,000  Ten Finneys
_______1000 One Finney

The word "Finney" seems unique enough. It has only 2 syllables and consists of 6 characters, which is fine. If would come naturally to people who are familiar with the One-Ten-Hundred system for a currency, and it is consistent among all orders or magnitude.
Another option would be using "One Mill" or something similar as a abbreviation of "One milli Bitcoin" and then get either a unique name for 1,000 Satoshis is just use ten of that for 10,000 Satoshis, Or stick with a Finney for 10,000 and get another unique name for 1,000 Satoshis, or just leave it at "One Thousand Satoshis". However, I consistently using the One-Ten-Hundred model comes more naturally and makes it easier for people to adopt

(the more inconsistent approach:)
____100,000  One Mill (abbreviation of One milli Bitcoin)?
_____10,000  One Finney
_______1000 One Thousand Satoshis


For the last 3 I think Satoshi has been adopted by a lot of bitcoiners alread. Yes, it has 3 syllables, but it's quite unique and it it's written form is easily recognized which is why I think using it in the One-Ten-Hundred system is quite fitting:

________100 Hundred Satoshis
_________10 Ten Satoshis
__________1 One Satoshi