Bitcoin Forum

http://s29.postimg.org/ww4o6th8n/bits.png

With momentum really starting to build behind using 'bits' as the primary unit for Bitcoin (as pointed out elsewhere, two decimals fits much better into legacy finance systems) I've been pondering symbols.

I was trying to tie in greek letter mu (µ) as the SI unit for a millionth, but nothing seemed to work.

Above all else, I wanted it to have an explicit relationship to the dominant Bitcoin symbol (and pursue the optimal route, of coming up with something unique rather than just cludge-repurposing some existing unicode char.

Please comment, remix, argue, encourage, discourage, as you feel appropriate below.

I like it. Do you think you could come up with a symbol for "Satoshi," the smallest possible unit of Bitcoin?

Currencies don't always need a "symbol" for a particular denomination.  Frequently a nickname is sufficient.

As examples with U.S. currency, please explain what the "symbol" is for the following denominations:

1 Lincoln (or fin)
1 Sawbuck (or Hamilton)
1 C-note (or Benjamin)
1 large (or grand, or G, or K, or stack)

"bits" is simply a popular slang nickname for micro-bitcoin in the same way that "grand" is simply a popular slang nickname for thousand dollars.

People are happy to use an extra character to indicate a larger scale of money ($5k) instead of ($5,000). I don't see any reason why it should be any different for the smaller scale of money (BTC5µ or µBTC5 or 5µBTC) instead of (BTC0.000005 or 0.000005BTC).

I say we replace 'bits' (which is already defined here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bit as the most basic unit of computing) with 'Hals' in memory of Hal Finney.

There is a critical difference - everyone knows that 'dollar' is the standard unit, in the main, all software and formal presentation is in unit dollars, both because that is the standard unit, and because that is the normal scale for everyday transactions.   

The logical comparison is much closer to 'cents' '¢' that to 'grand' (and while the US has quarters, dimes, and nickels, that is far from the norm)

The move to 'bits' is more fundamental, in that it will likely be the predominant usage down the line, and furthermore, will be the basic denomination coded into many systems, with satoshi 'cents'.  For display purposes we, along with many other companies, will be showing values in 'bits'; and it is much better for the ecosystem to support quick understanding and ease of use of 'bits' in the everyday world.

I have some ideas, as I'm sure others do; BUT that is a trivial concern compared to a symbol for 'bits', which I would like to get some broad buy-in for sooner rather than later.

Just my $0.02 worth   :-)

I'm no fan of the name 'bits', (e.g. "how many bits per bit is that?") BUT I think it's too late - and I won't be getting pulled into that debate.  And there's no reason why the name and symbol need to combine.  After all, dollar doesn't start with S (as in $) and neither Sterling nor Pound start with an L (as in £).   

You are trying to pin down a moving target and give a permanent symbol to a temporary slang name.  It seems rather silly.

Sure, right now some people (including yourself) have decided that micro-bitcoins (aka "bits") "will be the basic denomination coded into many systems, with satoshi 'cents'", but this is only because that makes sense for the current scale.  If a few years from now (or 5, or ten years from now), the value of bitcoins grows to the point where you can buy what today would be thought of as a $300,000 house for 3 "bits", then the scale will have moved and nobody will be see "bits" as "fundamental, in that it will likely be the predominant usage down the line".  They'll simply move to a new slang name for a new scale.

It just doesn't make sense to potentially need to come up with a whole new symbol, and for everyone to have to adjust to the new symbol, everytime the value of bitcoin increases to the point where people become more comfortable talking in terms of a new magnitude.

Bitcoin was designed to eventually become deflationary.  This means that on a long enought time scale as long as bitcoin exists, people will always be spending ever smaller amounts of bitcoin to acquire the same value of products or services.  By its very nature the predominant usage over time will continuously change.  Stick with nicknames and an extra character to indicate those ever smaller fractions of the base unit (the bitcoin), just like we do the opposite with inflationary currencies (using nicknames and an extra character to indicate the ever larger multiples of the base unit).

Yes.


No, I don't think so.

The point is that by fixing a target now, that makes it easier for real-humans and existing software to work with the currency, for now (and a few years), that potentially helps immeasurably with bitcoin adoption and accommodation between now and then.

Right now, satoshis as 'base units' are fairly intrinsic to the protocol - yes, in theory, and undoubtedly eventually in practice as well, another n bits of divisibility can be added - but I understand that to be a non-trivial exercise. So the 'moving target' is not arbitrary for today and not tomorrow, and the question will need to be readdressed later - but 'later' will not be as critical to bitcoin emergence  and adoption as 'now'.

[infact, if it was just for 'now' we'd all be talking mille-bitcoin]

Still you're point is valid - in the bigger picture, this is very much a tactical rather than strategic move. 

And you know that if we go with µB͈̎ people are going to call it you-bitcoin, and write it uB͈̎ and that's just going to make me cringe and want to thump people...

 ;D

Yes. Some will say "you-bitcoin", some will shorten it to "you-bee".  You might even get some saying "youb".

My personal preference are the slang names "mike", "micro", and "mick", but I acknowledge that the awful sounding name "bits" seems to be catching on.

It's only been 4 months since Bitpay decided to start using 'bits'. When the lowest denomination is named after the creator of bitcoin, why can't the recipient of the first transaction of bitcoins (Hal Finney. Satoshi sent him 10 BTC as a test.) be the second lowest unit? It just makes more sense than using 'bits', in my opinion.

Here's the fun thing about bitcoin.

There is no authority in charge of it.  That means there isn't anyone "official" that can say that the name for 0.000001 BTC WILL OFFICIALLY be known as anything at all.

If you start using the word "hals", and you convince your friends to use the word "hals", and you all convince some of the more well known bitcoin related businesses to use the word "hals", then the word "hals" might catch on and before long, it will be known as 1 hal.

You can't force anyone to use your favorite slang name, and nobody can force you to use their favorite slang name.  Coordinate an effort, and you just might find that "hal" catches on.  If it doesn't catch on, then either you didn't coordinate your effort well enough, or there just aren't enough people interested in using your chosen name.

I like it! And think it would be useful.

Why 'bits' and not just 'bit'?

'bit' can be both singular and plural.

The simplest form of the word is best.

What to speak of for Bitcoin, 'bit' should be primary micro (1/1,0000,000th) unit for all crypto currencies.

Then everything could be denoted in the single denomination 'bit'.

kb - kilobit
Mb - megabit
Gb - gigabit
Tb - terabit

That clears up so much impending multiple currency fractional unit confusion.

We need a clever denomination and we need to lose the btc standard before its too late.

I've read the entire thread and I can see clearly where your thinking is coming from in that with eight zeros the last two are the cents and the third zero column becomes the dollar (and one whole bit coin *could*be* interpreted as a "million dollars").

There's already a function to trade in milli and micro (my interpretation or names might be wrong there, feel free to correct) If you divide the number of people on the planet by the final number of whole bitcoins there is one bitcoin for every 312.7 people http://www.census.gov/popclock/ (Or inverse BTC0.00319785 per person on the planet at today's population count.

If feel in time as alt coins gain momentum, coins like bitcoin will end up becoming a device to move (the value contained in) other coins or currencies around with. In the above some one would be saying they have three thousand one hundred and ninety seven "bit's" and eighty five Satoshi's.

It may or may not work, Nice symbol btw.

Dude its not even a joke, we need to lose the BTC tag on every single exchange NOW, the amount of 0.0000's is scaring people away.

Hmm, yes, I see your point - RussiaCoins any-one? get them while they are sub-bits http://www.RussiaCoin.Info/  ;D

(...and there'll be roughly one RC per person in Mother Russia)

What's good, is that it's based on "b". It's intuitive in 3 ways:
1. "b" - for bit
2. Related with bitcoin ("B" and "b")
3. Related in right way ("B" for bigger unit and "b" for smaller one).

What's not so good is the graphical view of the symbol:
1. There is no standard ASCII symbol for it.
2. The vertical bars have different width. IMO, if they were the same width it would be more laconic, more harmonic and easier to draw.

Have to admit, I do like that symbol however I don't really see bitcoin needing a symbol at least not yet, may be in the near future.

its a nice idea  :)

In 5 years this will be on all modern keyboards.

nice!

Same here. We haven't even sorted out which one to use for bitcoin (as we're currently just using the one
that happens to look "close enough" and is in unicode. But yeah, nice initiative.

There was quite a lot of talk in the news about this "bits" adoption thing, but I'm not seeing many wallets actually using it.

Is there any consensus regarding using "bits" as a standard?

On topic: I like the proposed bit symbol a lot!

Put the second line going all the way through it. Every single other currency symbol has the line going through it, because it's easier to draw :)

$¥€

Danny, you say below that you like using Mikes, micro etc.

So what will be your slang for when 3 bits=$300,000 (your own example)? Will you just continue on to nano/pico...

Actually, a nano-bit doesn't sound half bad, perhaps we should just jump right to that?

Also, I can tell that your name is not Mike!

Why not?


Sure, except that at the moment the smallest division of a bitcoin supported in the protocol is 10 nano-bitcoins.

As for slang names, how about "nans", or "nanoes", or "en-bees", or "ens"?


Nope.  It's Danny.  ;)

Those sound terrible.
 You have to consider that professionals will be using this terminology. CEOs of companies are not going to be going around and saying "Our new product should cost 30 en-bees".

And yet they are perfectly happy to say that their product should cost 30 "doll-ors", 30 "you-rows", or 30 "pay-soes"?

Yes.

dol·lar
Origin

from early Flemish or Low German daler, from German T(h)aler, short for Joachimsthaler, a coin from the silver mine of Joachimsthal (‘Joachim's valley’), now Jáchymov in the Czech Republic. The term was later applied to a coin used in the Spanish American colonies, which was also widely used in the British North American colonies at the time of the American Revolution, hence adopted as the name of the US monetary unit in the late 18th century

en·bee
Origin

a term made up by Internet user DannyHamilton that has no real meaning and no real history

I like your symbol design, here's what I created based on your design just for fun.

http://s24.postimg.org/giqu3p4lh/bforbit_tom.jpg

the second is best

There are a few Unicode symbols that can in principle be reused.
Ђ    Ы Ԁ Ԃ Ҍ Ѣ Ъ ৳ ɓ ɓ̥ β ȶ ɓ ♭

This one:

Ъ

Goes nicely with BTCЪ

Whoa, wait a second. What exactly are you discussing? Etymology, or sound? Because “Those sound terrible” say NOTHING about etymology, but then you're saying the reason they sound terrible is because of their etymology.

This is a GOOD THING.  Why co-opt something with entrenched historical meaning for something totally new?  Generally, I think all the uses of various existing UNICODE B's and b-shaped symbols is daft.  It's not hard to get something added into unicode if we can show it's being used.  The Bitcoin B-double-bar was under discussion previously; the only reason it's not already part of the unicode char set is that the person making the case for it never responded to the unicode committee's questions.


I think it's more important to make it resonate with the B-double-bar, which has different stroke widths for the vertical bars and the stem.

http://icons-watermarks.s3.amazonaws.com/simple-black/foundation/foundation_bitcoin-circle/foundation_bitcoin-circle_simple-black_128x128.png

Who's this 'we'?  A quick google search shows that 99% are using the B-double-bar.

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bitcoin&tbm=isch&qscrl=1 (https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=bitcoin&tbm=isch&qscrl=1)

And that doesn't exist in Unicode, although in a few comprehensive and well implemented fonts, B͈̎ (0x0042, 0x030E , 0x0348) can work sort-of okay.

It's been 'locked in' as part of FontAwesome (http://fortawesome.github.io/Font-Awesome/icons/#currency), which is something of a de-facto collection of useful 'dingbats' that haven't made it into unicode.

http://i.stack.imgur.com/r1tUR.png

And even here on bitcointalk.org, putting BTC in square brackets in a post gives BTC

There might be some holdouts, but consensus was reached on the symbol for Bitcoin over a year ago.

Except bitcoin's?

BTC

I wanted to stay true to the one that's already known by most people.

My suggestion is for a 'reference design' which will naturally be reinterpreted by typeface designers

This might or might not work, depending on your installed fonts, but here for example is $ in Calibri $ and Courier New $

You will use whatever you will get understood at. Officially is all already set perfectly fine.

The reason they don't sound terrible to us is because they have history and are from an actual language. Hence etymology is related to how something sounds.

“enbee” sounds like “envy”, a real word with real etymology. Anyway, I still disagree that etymology affects the pretty sound.

Sounds more to me like what you get when you pronounce these two symbols:

nBTC

I'm not sure why anyone is so focused on that one example I gave.  I suppose it's to draw attention away from the other examples (such as "nans", "nanoes").

I wasn't specifically saying that any of those should be used, only that they were all reasonable options.

In the end the market will organically settle on something.  It could be "nano-bits", or "tinybits" or "widgets" for all I know.  Lets allow the future to decide what the future wants to call their money.

Sorry, I forgot to add my own opinion on the topic.

I actually agree with you, DannyHamilton, that SI units should be preferred, but that ultimately the one that works for the most people will win.