Bitcoin Forum

Should Bitcoin: URIs be allowed to contain only decimal bitcoins (BTC), or tolerate the human's choice of BTC or TBC (converted first to hexadecimal)?

Please note that even if hexadecimal is supported, nobody is required to use it. It remains the user's choice which number system they use. Even if you open a URI encoded in hexadecimal, you will see the Decimal/BTC equivalent in your client (unless you configure it for TBC). In other words, a vote for decimal-only is a vote to force humans who want to use tonal to switch to decimal.

If you want to request/bill for 10.25 BTC, you (or your shopping cart) would write:

• Decimal only: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=10.25
• Decimal or hexadecimal: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=10.25
• Decimal or duodeci or hexadeci: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=10.25

If you want to request/bill for 1.5 mBTC (milli-BTC), you (or your shopping cart) would write:

• Decimal only: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=0.0015
• Decimal or hexadecimal: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=0.0015
• Decimal or duodeci or hexadeci: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=0.0015

If you want to request/bill for 10.2 TBC (TonalBitcoin), you (or your shopping cart) would write:

• Decimal only: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=0.01056768
• Decimal or hexadecimal: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=x10.2
• Decimal or duodeci or hexadeci: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=x10.2

If you want to request/bill for 1 ᵐTBC (mill-TonalBitcoin), you (or your shopping cart) would write:

• Decimal only: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=2.68435456
• Decimal or hexadecimal: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=x1000
• Decimal or duodeci or hexadeci: bitcoin:youraddress?amount=x1000

This poll is biased and therefore meaningless. ;)

Is not

This poll is biased and therefore meaningless.

Objectively, the decimal-only option isn't rational, so the meaning of this poll remains: to show how bigoted the people on this forum are.

+1 ...

You're using emotionally-charged words in the poll. Few people will vote for "forcing" anyone to do anything. Maybe the options should be changed to:

• Accept only normal decimal BTC amounts that everyone is guaranteed to be familiar with now and forever
• Force developers of Bitcoin URI software to support hexadecimal values on the slim chance that one of the few people who deal in hexadecimal wants to edit a Bitcoin URI manually
• Accept hexadecimal and yet another rarely-used number base, forcing developers to do even more work.

1. URIs are not meant to be read by humans, so people being "familiar" with all possibilities is irrelevant.
2. You assume a glim future where people still use not only decimal, but BTC. This is not even rationally possible: people will either use mBTC, TBC, or Bitcoin will fail outright.
3. You imply supporting hexadecimal is difficult.
4. Dozenal has a rather large userbase too.

Why do you even care what is supported, then?


Everyone will at least understand decimal for the next 100 years. Everyone will understand what an original BTC represents for as long as Bitcoin exists.


It's a waste of time.

Humans shouldn't need to read them, but humans often do write them.
Are you sure? Most of the world is in major population reduction mode, while at least I personally hope to have many more children (4 so far). Only takes a few generations, and I'm just one person.
It's not your time. Every client except apparently js-remote has a full implementation already. Removing that implementation would be the real waste of time. If tcatm wants to complain about the time to implement it for js-remote, I'd be glad to do it for him.

This poll is useless, there is no option for "decimal satoshis only for all API work".