Wow, I had no idea that people put so much faith in the efficient-market hypothesis.  I view it more as a rule of thumb, something along the lines of "the best estimate of tomorrow's price is today's price".

Saying that money isn't real is like saying that words aren't real.  But words are real... I use them whenever I write or speak.  You could even say that I am using words when I read or listen.

The properties of money can be summarized as: scarcity, fungibility, and convenience.  People usually break "convenience" up into a few more (such as divisibility and portability), but I don't see the point of doing that.

Mining makes bitcoin work, but other than that it is completely irrelevant.  People spend far too much time thinking about miners.

Yes, but blockchain transaction volume doesn't have to grow.  Even now most activity happens off of the block chain.  For example MtGox does a lot of business every day, with day traders constantly making trades.  Those trades are not part of the blockchain.

In the future we're going to see a world where many bitcoin users never interact with the blockchain.  Instead they'll keep their bitcoins in bank accounts and spend them with debit cards.  This has to happen if bitcoin is to succeed, because the alternative (regular people safely using raw bitcoins and not having them stolen by hackers) will never happen.


At this point you aren't talking about bitcoin.  You're talking about a currency controlled by governments and central banks.  Also I wasn't saying that average users need to be able to run nodes.  I'm saying that average nerds need to be able to run nodes.  Not only is the idea of an average user running a node absurd, but the idea of an average user using a bitcoin client is absurd.  Raw bitcoins will never catch on.  They are simply too hard for regular people.  They are going to need to use them through debit cards, small denomination paper wallets, etc...

The way to keep non-mining nodes in the network is to simply ensure that the blockchain grows slower than hard drive capacity does.  People with lots of bitcoins have an incentive to run a node, simply to keep their money secure.

Any other solution results in a loss of confidence in the currency and the emergence of a rival blockchain, and most likely that rival will simply be a fork.  Except that it won't be the fork, it will be the original that 99% stick with.

The US will never default on its loans.  It can just print more money.

Furthermore your whole premise is based on the idea that people aren't idiots.  Any prediction that relies on the non-stupidity of people is unlikely to come true.

Also, the idea of a metric currency was already rejected by Europeans.  They had the chance to make the euro metric but they decided against it.

We can name a unit after Gavin when he is dead or retired.  Naming it after him would just give him more power, which is not what bitcoin needs.

We need to all get behind millibits with the ₥ symbol.  The nonsense that is mBTC will never catch on, but ₥ will catch on.  Let's forget that there was ever a unit called "bitcoin".  I want to see the BTC symbol only be used for the system, not as a denomination.  Bitcoin is the name of the system, millibit is the name of the unit of currency.  There are not other units; this isn't the metric system.  Just one unit, just one symbol.

Seriously, we've been debating this issue for at least two years now.  No one is going to be completely happy with any solution, so we all just have to mass together and act as one entity.

We need to make some sort of list of 1000 people who agree with this change.  Once we get 1000 people we will all simultaneously submit a support ticket to MtGox, informing them that bitcoin is a system, not a unit, and that the unit is the mill (₥).  MtGox will change, then everyone else will change the next day.  Then random people will see that they can afford bitcoin mills and they will join us.  Everyone lives happily ever after.

Thank you for taking the time to help me with this.

My goal is to have a short program that I can give 256 random bits to (which I am confident that I can generate by hand) and it will produce a bitcoin address and its private key.  I know how to program but I do not know much about cryptography.  I could try to write the key generation process but I would rather use proven code.  I was thinking about making the entire key pair by hand but then I realized that the hashing algorithm is far too computationally intensive to do by hand (as it should be)

Edit: thanks for the link.  I think that I'm going to have to read a lot more code than I thought I would.  I was hoping for a big ball of mud function that I could just change a little.

"Bit" is never going to be the official name of a currency unit.  Bit is such a common word, at least among programmers, that it simply can't happen.  That would be like naming it "person".  How much does that hotdog cost?  Four persons?  Never going to happen.

I think that we should be going to microbits (100 satoshi = 1 microbit) but there is no support for my idea.  There seems to be support for moving the decimal about 4 places, which is better than nothing.

The problem is that people keep trying to tie this into the metric system, which is more hassle than it is worth.  For example the euro is not at all metric, even though it is a new currency that could easily been made metric.  So let's call the new unit millibit instead of millibitcoin.  Let's have the symbol be the actual mill symbol ₥ instead of the nonsense that is mBTC.

This idea isn't my favorite idea, but it is the idea that will have support:

1 millibit = 1₥, which currently costs about $0.11 on MtGox.

Again, this isn't my favorite idea but it is the idea that will have support.  Who is with me?  Its time to win.

Most of the criticism of my idea is incorrect, but the bottom line is that my idea is not getting any support.  Ok then I give up, let's try millibits.  I propose the ₥ symbol:  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_%28currency%29

Millibit is awkward and uncool.  Microbit is smooth and sharp.  Find a marketing guy who knows nothing about bitcoin and ask him which he prefers: millibit or microbit.  I am certain that he will choose the latter.




You missed my point.  I am not using micro as a metric prefix.  The fact it is used in so many contexts is a strength.  It simply means "very small".  The fact that there is a metric prefix that means 1/1000000 is just a fortunate coincidence.

 
This is all true, but you are forgetting that the price will surge by at least 10x once any change is adopted  So if we go to millibits we would soon see people getting only .9434 millibits to the dollar.

That's a bit of a start.  I traced it back a bit, and I'm thinking that this EC_KEY_generate_key might be the function that I am looking for.  Is there an easy way to search across all of the files?  ctrl-f in my browser just searches within the current page.  I could download the whole source but I'd really rather not.

I would like to look at the code that creates a random number, then makes a private key from that, then makes the address from that.

I looked here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin/tree/master/src

I checked in a few likely files and didn't see it.  I realized that I might not recognize it when I see it.  So please point me to the file name and function name.

My goal is to make an offline paper wallet generator where the user generates the random number by hand (by shuffling a deck of cards multiple times).  This way I will not have to trust the random number generator.  I don't want to trust anything except myself.  I will make the source code for my program available.

The problem with using "bit" is that the world already has a meaning and thus it can't be googled.  Or eventually the current meaning will be ungoogleable.

>  You don't need jumbles of letters like mBTC

I agree.  I did not provide a jumble of letters for my microbit concept.  My assumption is that we would end up with a currency symbol, such as ℳ (the old sign for the German Mark) or ₥ (which people have considered using but never did)

> The prices would be very large numbers. Too large to be comfortable.

That's true.  It isn't a perfect solution.  However millibitcoin is a really awkward term.  Furthermore the current largeness of the prices would soon be gone, as interest would increase rapidly due to the more inviting price.  The awkwardness of millibitcoin sticks around.

> We can use mBTC now, and switch to micro when bitcoin is much more valuable.

Can we?  What about when all of our laws are written in millibitcoin?  What about when our keyboards have a currency symbol for millibitcoin but they don't have one for microbits?

> Also, mBTC is already built into most clients, and requires no code changes to use.

Of course it requires a code change, the default setting has to change.  That's what we're talking about.

This thread is for debating the merits of microbits instead of millibitcoins.  This discussion is for people who are already convinced that the current price is a barrier to further adoption.  If you do not accept this premise then there is no point posting in this thread.  Ok, so here are my arguments in favor of microcoins:

Millibitcoins is long and awkward.  The fact that it can be shortened with slang is not sufficient to overcome this.

The main appeal behind the name "millibitcoins" is that it uses a metric prefix.  If metric prefixes are so great, why isn't the Euro metric?  How come there is a 100€ bill instead of a h€ bill (1 hectoeuro)?  How come there is a 10c (10 cent) coin issued instead of a d€ (decieuro) coin?  The people designing the euro believed that metric prefixes didn't have any advantage over a more normal type of currency.  I agree with them.

So why am I proposing a coin that seems to use a metric prefix?  The difference is that "micro" has a meaning beyond the metric system.  It comes from a Greek word meaning "small", and this word has entered modern usage to mean very small.  People are very comfortable with the word "micro" as evidenced by the line of toys called "micro machines", the use of microscopes, slang like "micropenis" and so on.  People from all walks of live feel comfortable with the word "micro".  "Milli", on the other hand, is not widely used as a standalone concept.

Notice that I am suggesting microbits instead of microbitcoins.  Again, the purpose of this change is to make something easier to say.  You could argue that microbit is the word for one millionth of a bit, and thus it might seem like some sort of computer terminology.  However actual computer bits are not divisible and measuring data rates in microbits would be absurd.  So there is no conflict.

Hopefully by now I've convinced you that microbit is a superior name, but why set the value of a microbit at 100 satoshis?  (well besides pleasing the metric people).

The answer is that it is hard to get people to accept a change, and this might be our last chance to change it.  Right now it wouldn't be hard to switch to microbits.  We need to convince two people: a developer for Bitcoin-Qt and Mark Karpeles (MtGox).  If these two entities switch over to pricing things in a new unit everyone will switch over.  Now imagine trying to switch from millibitcoins to microbits sometime in the distant future.  Now we have to convince Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Paypal, Amazon, Walmart, etc... and all of the other companies that handle bitcoins.

Another reason is that the microbit is a good size.  Right now the world money supply is about 60 trillion dollars.  Someday this may all be in bitcoin.  If there are 18 million bitcoins (some get lost) that's 3.33 million dollars per bitcoin, which means that a satoshi will be worth $0.03 and a microbit would be worth $3.33 in today's money.  You would also be able to use two decimal places because there would be 100 satoshis to a microbit.  That would be appealing to people.

Ok that's great, but that may never happen.  What about now?  Well right now the price is something like $106 for one bitcoin.  That's written from the perspective of someone who thinks in bitcoin (someone who is selling).  We need to change it to the perspective of someone who is buying.  Instead imagine if the price were shown as 9434 microbits for a dollar.  As you can imagine, that would be very appealing to many people.  It also will help people wrap their price around the scarcity of bitcoins.  Right now you can tell people that the price is going up due to the scarcity of bitcoin, but they don't understand it.  Now imagine if the price goes from 9434 microbits for a dollar, down to 8355 microbits for a dollar, down to 6110 microbits to a dollar.  Look how obvious the scarcity is now.  This explains how ripple (which shows prices this way and has a very small unit) was able to get market cap that rivals bitcoin so quickly, despite the fact that bitcoin has four years and a million users whereas ripple is completely new and unproven.

So, thoughts?

For those who doubt the importance of this change, just look at XRP (Ripple).

If I'm interpreting https://ripplecharts.com/markets correctly, the current price is 152,884.58 XRP for $1

Right there that sounds cheap right?  Sure I'll buy a million XRP for six and a half dollars.  Except that that means that the market cap is 654088.20, which is about two-thirds the market cap of bitcoin.  Should ripple's market cap be anywhere near the market cap of bitcoin?  No way.  Bitcoin has four years and hundreds of thousands of people behind it.  Ripple is new and untested.

So why is Ripple beating bitcoin? Because it looks affordable.  In order for bitcoin to keep growing we need to be able to recruit regular people.  Regular people can't handle numbers.

Sticking with a bitcoin as the unit is out of the question.  The debate is entirely over what unit to go to.  There are three strong contenders:

Bitcent (strong contender due to name, gives us dollar parity which is good)

Bitmill (horrible name, but good through the next boomtime.  Gavin's change made this less desirable though, making the minimum transaction size 6 bitmillcents)

Satoshi (we're going there eventually, do it now?  Plus then exchanges can express prices in a more appealing way: X satoshis per dollar)

In theory this is not a protocol change, but in practice it isn't.

Miners running this fork of the software will not only not process small transactions, but they will not even relay them.  Which means that miners running legitimate clients will not be able to process small transactions because these transactions will never be relayed to them.

Bitcoin is no longer sufficiently divisible to be the global currency.  This really changes the potential maximum valuation.

Anyone blaming Satoshi's Dice is not contributing to the conversation.  The block size is limited to 1 MB, which is not too big.  If you don't want SD transactions in the chain feel free to out-compete them by making transactions with larger fees.