Bitcoin Forum

Hey guys,

right now the reporting about Bitcoin is taking off. A recurring mistake i see in each and every posting regarding Bitcoin is the percieved limit of payment units, giving people a sense that the BTC is the smallest unit around and only 7m exist right now. Bitcoin is hard to grasp as it is, so understanding that there are one million pieces to a bitcoin seems to be too far fetched to tech journalists and the average joe user.
I see the percieved value of bitcoins as key issue to more widespread acceptance, after all most people would see themselves limited to having 0,00135 something if accepted globally, giving people a permanent feeling of not having anything.
To overcome this "perception" issue and to introduce a naming pattern for bitcoin i suggest the following, without changing ANY values, just the naming and display pattern:

a) re-brand the current type of unit used within the system from BTC to MBTC

b) use the term Bitcoin for what is currently 1 millionth of a Bitcoin

optionally c) leave the 0,x to be the subdivision of a bitcoin

Here is a quick mock-up on how such change could appear, with or without option c:
http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/8458/201105220257.png (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/685/201105220257.png/)

http://img607.imageshack.us/img607/8921/201105220304.png (http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/607/201105220304.png/)

In the end, it all boils down to giving people a simple terminology that uses terms they have come to learn in the past decade through personal computers seems to be the most consumer friendly approach.

edit: for reference, here is the link to the current unit charts and some other suggestions

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units)
https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Universal_Bitcoin (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Universal_Bitcoin)

edit: hm, it's working now, nvm

You have an extra zero in there. A bitcoin is 100 million "satoshis", not 1 billion.

Please see the thread at http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=8282.0

For an extensive discussion of this issue.

the issue is not the same, its not about naming 0,001 btc but changing the naming and numeration system towards SI and shifting the bitcoin unit down

so the left chart is wrong yes? i had assumed it was a 3 step system. i will make a change to reflect that later today. thanks for the feedback

An interesting idea. We have to think about that.

While it would have been nice if Satoshi had anticipated the concern about public understanding of divisibility when he started Bitcoin, I think its way too late
to change what "a Bitcoin (BTC)" represents.  It will be too confusing, but I do think we need to have solid names for 1/1000 of a bitcoin and 1/1,000,000 of a Bitcoin and less.

I agree it's too late to change BTC or probably any of the other units (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Units). But if the whole unit system were to be reorganized, something like this (https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Universal_Bitcoin) would be much more sensible.

Like!

1 BTC = 0,001 SAT
1 SAT = 1000 BTC

Easy

It's a key aspect of anything "universally accepted" to be percieved easy to grasp and simple. The concept of bitcoin in many aspects is difficult to grasp for even more engaged consumers, do you want to overburden them with those "TL;DR" charts?
Giving people a simple terminology that uses terms they have come to learn in the past decade through personal computers seems to be the most consumer friendly approach.

If there has ever been an argument for changing a naming system from the current situation to a system that is simplified, it would be your two charts. You can win coders hearts with these, the average consumer opens these charts and will just close it out of utter confusion and "fear of complexity".

The only problem is on the forums, not in real life.

Currently, the BTC unit is divisible to FAR below the point that anyone cares.  And if we start getting transactions down to that point, it is trivial to extend the protocol.  In fact, we will probably extend it for technical reasons a century or two before any real life transactions need the extra digits.  Yes, I said centuries, and no, I wasn't kidding.

Why not worry about something that might become a problem in your lifetime rather than making up this crap?

I am sorry if that wasnt clear, i think you are misinterpreting my posting as a suggestion to change anything in the code or protocol. It is not, it is a suggestion to change the naming pattern to one that is NOT a problem in real life. I consider the current naming system unacceptable for widespread use, hence the suggestion.

The naming pattern we have now is not a problem in real life.

It is only possible for a person to imagine that the BTC is indivisible if they've never even heard about bitcoins.  Every single thing that I've seen that displays bitcoins does so with at least a couple digits after the decimal, starting with the stock client, the faucet, Mt Gox, the block explorer, every single mining pool website, etc, etc.

Where are you finding people that both 1) have heard of bitcoins, and 2) think they are atomic and indivisible?

Unfortunately I think the existing naming system is probably too entrenched for this to be a doable thing now. Already people are using mBTC, cBTC, uBTC, etc to shift the decimal place, and I don't know that that is bad.

After all, for most household and benchtop uses, who measures things in meters? I remember in science class in school meters were almost never used. I am much more familiar with how large is a millimeter or a centimeter than a meter. My estimation of a meter is "approximately 3 feet" from my USian upbringing.

The point is, people use cm and mm without batting an eye. I understand your hesitancy given that "less than one" feels like too little. However, I don't know that the overhead to change this in people's minds is low enough vs. the expected benefit of changing the units. I am still open to persuasion if you can find some surefire way to communicate this.

Also the unit of satoshi is nice, but I think it just muddies the waters, especially given that there probably is no satoshi anyway.

This is actually a problem. If you watch 'bitcoin' on twitter you'll see a lot of "What, only 21 million ever? That's not enough to go around at all! Herp derp." Of course, the intelligence or attention level of most of the troglodytes on Twitter is so low in the first place (with respect to bitcoin) that they may not matter.

Do you read techblogs like techcrunch who have millions of readers? I quote from http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/21/the-bitcoin-experiment/


While not stating directly bitcoins are atomic, it heavily implies it to the reader.

Holy crap, that passes for content these days?  Ugh, I'm glad I've never read that site before, and I think I'll continue never reading it.

Please note that your proposal does nothing to solve the real problem here:  shitty 'journalism'.

Actually, the fact is that it is basically impossible to add any more precision. It's possibly if the whole network upgrades, but that's basically creating a new network. It's just as "trivial" as changing the 21 million total into something else.

Considering that we will have several decades of warning of the impending need to switch precisions, I still think it will be trivial to upgrade the entire network.

Changing the generation scheme to give more than 21 million coins would also be technically trivial, but the social effects would destroy the whole system.

Please dont mix this discussion about protocol etc with the initial topic at hand as its not related to it and can very easily create confusion since at first glance it sounds related to my proposal.

Sorry, wasn't trying to derail.

I still just don't see that the problem, to the extent that I see a problem at all, is something that can be solved in this way.  If you are teaching a child math, and they don't understand how to divide 3 by 7, you don't tell him that 3 is really 3,000,000 frobnitzs.  Instead you show him how to use the tools that already exist (fractions and decimals).

I would actually quite like us to come up with a name for the smallest possible unit, because it makes API design simpler. In BitCoinJ I called the smallest unit possible "nanocoins" and was (rightly) called on it, because that's not the right prefix to use (it makes sense to design APIs in terms of integers rather than floats).

I honestly can't say I like satoshis as the smallest unit either, but at this point I'll take anything. The alternative is just referring to money denominated in integer units as "value" which is a bit of a cop-out.

It wouldn't hurt for Bitcoiners to stop saying this, and to start saying "No more than 21,000,000.00000000000" will ever exist.

Yes, i know what you mean. Its not about any technical issue but bitcoin having aspects that make it unecessarily complex for "users". Hence the suggestion, without changing anything except what clients write next to the actual balance, to make it more user friendly.
I assume that regarding the major public, you can safely assume two things:
a) they want a currency that scales up like every other currency, virtual or not, out there. people rather have a HUGEPILEOFSOMETHING than a 0.002 of something, even if it is the same number under the hood of the software and in valueation
b) never underestimate the psychology of money and markets. by saying 21 million bitcoins are the max, which is true with the current logic, people implicitly percieve bitcoin as a very short lived system. people have to do research and actually take time to grasp the concept of fractions of btc to actually get rid of that "first reaction". if you make people think that there are 21 trillion or quatrillion or wherever u set the btc unit in the system, the immediate first reaction is "aint no limit i will ever get to in that system, sounds good", which is infinitely better than assuming "shit, only 21 million, who came up with that, bill gates can buy all of that lol roflcopter".

Yes, my suggestion caters to the coding unsawvy and mathematically not so talented. which is 95%+ of the internet. If bitcoin wants to be widespread it has to change the "parts interfereing with endusers" to a system that makes them feel fuzzy, at home and rich. Giving that CPU miner 0,03 BTC sounds so awful to him, giving him 0,03 MEGA of something makes him feel "well its mega, so 0,03 is a nice piece of the pie".

The public will be fine with "millibitcoins" as an accepted unit, regardless of the fact that one bitcoin=1BTC. Providing we follow SI the other way, without moving anything, it'll be fine. Compare the relative size of the litre to the gram: it just doesn't matter so long as we are consistent.

Can't this be solved by just changing the default display units in the client for example, to mBTC (or later uBTC)? Then instead of 0.010 BTC you have 10 mBTC or 10000 uBTC. Looks much bigger. :)

That's a BAD thing. If 0.03 BTC discourages CPU mining, great! It should be discourage.

P.S. note that commas are for deliminating thousands, not a decimal point

Actually in many parts of the world it is the opposite. I think we all understand each other here, hm? 0,03 cannot be 0 thousand and thirty, right?

I think you're naming in the wrong direction.  Should the rate of acceptance or exchange grow from here to respectible levels (10,000 dollars per coin or 30% of the world population using BTC), you don't need to worry about what you'll call 1 million BTC.  It will simply be 1 million BTC.  We don't say megadollars.

You'd need to figure out how to name 0.001BTC all the way down to 0.000001BTC.

At least the original client intentionally forces a proper decimal point regardless of locale settings. I agree that removing the ambiguity is a good thing.

Well, please reread the RFC, it is about avoiding naming endless fractions but instead change the commonly used name for unit x in the unchanged numerical system.

Today, technology review posted a very good article on Bitcoins titled "What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters" yet they again we see the 21m issue:

No matter how much coders and technocrats argue that the bitcoin is divisible, which was never questioned, the issue will not go away. "Average Joe" users dont like and dont want something that is divisible 1m times. they want 100 or max 1k, like tehy are used to.

Link to the article: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37619/?a=f (http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37619/?a=f)

I agree. The Average Joe is pretty stupid and we want mainstream acceptance. There's no currency in the world that has the purchasing power of the bitcoin as far as I know- people simply aren't used to a single unit of a currency being worth $7-10 and the value could cause people to reject it as being "too much" or "overvalued". Also you're probably greatly overestimating the math skills of the general public and people's ability to understand decimals, it's sad but true. If you want bitcoin to be universally used and accepted, everyone, including those below average, needs to be able to grasp its value.  I don't think this is extremely pressing at the moment, but if it gets to the point that a single bitcoin becomes such a valuable unit that 95% of all commercial transactions involve sums of less than a bitcoin, a switch of naming should be considered.

For those interested in the discussion, this vote might be interesting as follow up http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13144.0