mm.. I know what you mean..  but I strongly suspect bitcents will be used by some people even if they're not 'official'.. and they'll probably want a silver logo.
It just seems to me that 'cents' in various currencies are silver. Making the mBTC silver might make it more likely that newcomers will confuse them as being 100th of a bitcoin.

I'll await further feedback.

Yeah..  for some reasonably loose definition of 'standardize' that still gives artists reasonable freedom.
I'd say it's more of a 'guideline' and I'd only push for it as a standard in so far as saying 'please don't use green for millicoins if 99% of the planet is using green for microcoins'
Agreed - the colouring of the number itself is secondary.

I've followed a few discussions around this myself..  and while I've disagreed that bitcents should disappear, my argument has mainly been that I expect the general public will expect them to exist, and will use the concept anyway.

However..  in the interests of simplicity, why not give them a chance to die out and see what happens?
so.. If you check back in my edited original post, I've ditched the bitcents and produced a simplified chart.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback. 
Perhaps this whole thread has been just yet more noise on the units topic and will be ignored anyway.. but one day something like this will stick and gain wider traction I hope.

Should GLBSE really be supporting this sort of scheme as one of it's tradable assets?

While I can sort of see a case for it because it's up front about what it is, it strikes me as the sort of thing that will negatively affect GLBSE's growth.
Why not restrict assets to those that have at least a plausible sustainable investment model - and also are not so likely to attract negative attention from the media and/or various law enforcement/regulatory bodies?

While in general I expect the bitcoin community would be hesitant to get law enforcement involved in disputes - there are perhaps cases involving fraud where there is a place for cooperation with certain agencies. (e.g MTGox indicated they may get law enforcement involved with certain aspects of the recent hack)
Having an asset like bitponzi on the books seems to make it unlikely you'd get any cooperation if for some reason the exchange did need to work with investigators on some issue.

That aside.. it's just likely to scare the average investor off and thus reduce the potential depth of the GLBSE exchange.

Wouldn't it be in your interests to drop bitponzi and at least have a basic 'dress code' for listings? - e.g: 
a) real world contact details which you have verified (can be kept secret - but retained in case of fraud)
b) plausible sustainable business model
c) enough transparency in operations to give credence to b).

I can see you're going for a hands off approach from your terms and conditions.. which is fine to an extent..
but it puts your interests somewhat at odds with those of the average investor.
BitcoinGlobal could be seen to be making a profit from shonky asset operators. 

You state:
"We assume no responsibility or liability for any fraud committed on this exchange but will do our best to prevent its occurrence."
Ponzi schemes aren't likely to fit into most peoples expectations of doing the best to prevent fraud. Even if bitponzi itself is up front about it - you can almost guarantee some early participant will misrepresent it to someone else in order to get more money into the pot.
It's a bit like a company saying they don't spam, yet they encourage their agents to do it on their behalf.

Your exchange your rules.. but it strikes me that you're making a gift for whatever competitors come along and setup an exchange that feels more 'business-like'.

Looks real in the vid!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9d_fLh_Vn4o

Hardly a Darwin candidate.. not going to get her killed - and certainly not going to stop her getting laid!

I'm all for it.  Getting inked with bitcoin is obviously some sort of vote in favour of the currency.. but putting it somewhere so hidden, and where it can be further hidden by not shaving.. is kind of having it both ways.

Yeah.. last time I skyped with someone in China, he was living in a room that was little more than a shack - but had modern hardware he purchased at a fraction of the price it costs here in Australia.
Cheap beer there too apparently.    I think I might like it there!

Sort of.. It's not intended that a single number should be displayed multicoloured.. that's a bit complex and doesn't help so much I think.
It was more so that if someone is entering data - they have visual confirmation of what unit they are working in, and also an indication of the final scale of the transaction.  
It might also be of use in price lists where a merchant might prefer to specify all prices in something such as mBTC, but provide some display of equivalent BTC at the checkout point.


e.g if someone always likes entering in using the usual whole BTC
 

Data Entry		Scale Confirmation Panel
0.069 BTC		6.9 cBTC
0.001592 BTC		1.592 mBTC
0.0004 BTC		400 uBTC
0.00000032 BTC		32 satoshi

If the BTC has deflated somewhat and someone generally uses millis for day to day transactions,
they might set their standard data entry to be mBTC
 

Data Entry		Scale Confirmation Panel
3141 mBTC		3.141 BTC
220 mBTC		22 cBTC
0.1 mBTC		100 uBTC

Over time, people would get familiar with the colours and icons and it'd help give them a feel for the size of the transaction they're dealing with.

Look.. a lot if not most people currently here on the forums probably don't need this sort of assistance.
I think however that for bitcoin to become more generally used - graphical hints will help significantly, and if some common scheme isn't settled on, it'll just be confusing.  Now perhaps I shouldn't bother pushing the issue, as whichever piece of software becomes most popular may effectively decide the standards.
I'm just throwing this out for discussion as one way of handling this sort of thing.

Correct. I commented before that this example was poor. My bad.

What I was thinking of there was a confirmation phase - where a UI might indicate that the scale of that number was mBTC by also displaying the equivalent 1.59265 mBTC blue as a popup or something.

Something similar to what would happen if you took the money as banknotes and buried it in the woods somewhere?

What..  like they couldn't just move the decimal point or add a zero?
Please explain your argument further - it currently makes no sense to me.

Like what.. the satoshi?  Because it's part of Bitcoin history and because there are only 8DP in the current implementation.
I didn't make up any new units.



yes - the image shows bitcents and millicoins..  So you want to add 'decicoin'?
It's just 10 bitcents. 
I've already explained the reasoning for leaving cents and satoshis in along with the existing SI units. I really don't know why you'd want to add another. Does anyone talk of decicoins when dealing with US or AU currencies for example?


I don't see anyone claiming otherwise.

So you can use colours cryptically in a way only engineers might understand..
Can it really be a surprise to you that colour can also enhance and act as a mnemonic?

Which exchanges are on the up and which down?
http://www.bitcoincharts.com/markets/

( oh look.. red and green side by side too..)

That's not how I envisage it being used.
Pick a unit - and that's the colour/name/icon you're dealing with.
23.15 uBTC (green)    vs  0.00002315 BTC

It's not about avoiding decimal points altogether. It's picking a convenient unit for day to day transactions and having as many strong visual cues as possible as to the unit you're dealing with.

Tell the average person their wallet has 0.00417597 BTC  and it's going to cost them 0.00002315 BTC to click some link - and their eyes will glaze over trying to do the maths.
Tell them they have 4175.97 uBTC and the cost is 23.15 uBTC - and they'll have a better feel for what the relative cost is.

Accuse me of underestimating the intelligence of the public if you want..  (though I hear there's a famous quote about nobody going broke doing that)

Fair enough.. 
Perhaps replacing the red satoshi with black would be better. 

Yes.
That matches my experience with many people.
The fact that it's not just milli,micro,nano - but also 'bitcents' and 'satoshi' add significantly to the confusion when it comes to decimals.
I doubt we can avoid 'bitcents' because so many people are used to their primary unit of currency having a secondary unit being 100th of the main one.
Even if we meticulously avoided mentioning it - the public would end up thinking of the 14 in 3.14 BTC as some sort of 'cent'.
We can't really avoid the satoshi because the bitcoin divides down to 8DP instead of the 9DP we'd expect for the nano boundary.



Exclusively?  You mean pick just one and get the entire Bitcoin community to switch to it?
If everyone exclusively dealt with satoshi - then the numbers would be a little unwieldy for even a few thousand BTC.
Perhaps uBTC would be ok.


Sure - but are we as a society (including kids and grandparents) so adept at throwing around zeros and decimal points that when everyone is trying to pay with BTC on a mobile phone it'll be easy to do it without making a mistake?   
Throw in coloured/iconized units and my proposition is that the user interface will make it manageable.

It may be that sticking to the colours gold,silver and just one more colour/icon for micro would be a better scheme,
but I created colour boundaries at the SI milli,micro,nano points because it's hard to know where the value is headed - and what units might be practical.
Given the possibility of microtransactional systems based on bitcoin - such 'sub-coins' might make a lot of sense in various applications.
 
For me - the colours are a good cue - but they're only 1 third of the distinguishing aspect of any particular unit.
The name and the distinct icon are just as important.

I essentially agree.  It doesn't come across well in my initial explanation - but that's the underlying idea.

Let's say your user interface is currently set to enter values in bitcents - it'd be silver..
But if you enter 242   - it might be nice for the interface to give a hint (perhaps in a confirmation dialog)
that the scale of the transaction is 'gold' because you've gone above the limits of silver.

If you enter 0.5 bitcents - the entry interface is silver - but the scale of the transaction displayed at confirmation is blue for 5 millicoins.

It's up to UI designers to make it all neat and intuitive (no trivial feat) - but at least if there was a general consensus on colours/names/recognisable icons..  this sort of thing could be a useful clarification aid and error checker.

As bitcoins are currently divisible to 8DP - the smallest existing unit (satoshi) is actually 10nanocoins.
If it had been 9DP I might agree - but the satoshi seems somewhat entrenched in this regard.


I gave the benefit of the doubt and assumed it was gen-Y speak for 'lame'.  Yeah, the origin of using 'gay' that way is homophobic too... but it's probably a losing battle to fight the way young-uns speak. The fact they know it grates a bit on some people, and that they often just perceive people who complain about it as overly 'PC'..  will probably just make them want to use it more.

I don't know why the association between rainbows and 'gay'..  but I can see that too much colour can have a 90's geocities era crappy web feel!

I had in mind they might be used in certain applications such as games, or other systems not directly running bitcoin wallets where small costs might need to be allocated.  I probably could've  left off pico and stopped at the pinkies though.


I think gold and silver are pretty much a given for BTC and bitcents - very intuitive.
After that - it's only 3 more. Blue,green red.  (forget pink and brown - it's just illustrative and/or future use or special applications)

Nobody needs to 'remember' a bunch of colours before getting going.
The whole point is that the user interfaces would automatically display these along with other visual cues such as the word (millicoin,microcoin etc) and a different icon. Memory of colour associations would come with time just as people get familiar with the colours of their local currencies notes/coins.
I gather USD notes aren't very colourful..  this isn't the case for some other world currencies.

Yeah - my previous example of displaying 0.00159265 in blue was perhaps not the best -as that's really a fraction of the gold unit BTC.
A nicer user interface might be to flip it to millicoins and enter 1.59265
equivalent to flipping to microcoins and entering 1592.65
or even satoshis 159265
The colour should be just one cue along with the unit name and visually distinguishable icon.

I did think of colour blind people..  and even looked it up to see if it should affect my colour choice,
but in the end I found there were a few different types of colour blindness, and I didn't really see what I could do about it.
Just read the sub-bitcoin logos I guess!

mm.. as I used to be into electronics - I don't know why this didn't occur to me!

I felt a little constrained in that whole BTC should be gold(yellow) and it really seems most logical for bitcents to be silver
(as far as I'm aware - this would be familiar to people from many nations as the colour of most higher value coins?)
Having those 2 colours fixed.. kind of rules out following the scheme used by resistors I guess.

I chose green as the microcoin just because green is widely associated with money - and I guess I was in an absurdly optimistic mood in thinking that when whole BTC become impractical as a general unit of trade - we'll all be doing our day to day transactions down in the green zone



Well.. I don't really anticipate that rainbows would be displayed that much.
EDIT: As pointed out by others 0.00159265 would be Gold - as it's still in BTC units.
It may make sense for a confirmation dialog/notification panel to display it as 1.59265 mBTC Blue to give an indication of the scale.

The full 3.14159265 would normally be displayed as gold - it's just for explanatory purposes that the colour chart shows it rainbow-fashion.

 

It doesn't seem so useful to me to do anything colour related with large numbers of whole BTC.
I think everyone is familiar enough with commas/spaces as thousands separators etc and it wouldn't really assist. It's all gold up there!

The topic of bitcoin units seems to come up often around here - and particularly the perceived psychological impediment to dealing with fractions of a coin.

It occurs to me that in user interfaces, it might be handy to have some visual cues (eg in the form of coloured coin images) as to the sum involved in any particular transaction.
For example - any amount above 1BTC would be Gold (as per the common bitcoin coin logos)
An amount from 1 bitcent to less than 1BTC  - Silver
From 1 milli-bitcoin to less than 1 bitcent - Blue
from  1 micro-bitcoin to less than 1 milli-bitcoin Green  
0 to less than 1 micro-bitcoin  (ie satoshis)  Red

The pink and brown ones were just thrown in to make it clear how nano/pico fit in - perhaps for future use.
I liked the idea of 'pinkies' being a sub-satoshi unit (like the pinky finger)  and well..  brown for pico because it reminds me of those muddy coloured 1 and 2c pieces we used to have here in australia.

The colour scheme is primarily based on SI units milli,micro,nano..  except that bitcents and satoshis are interesting enough to warrant extra colour divides.
As a slight hint that silver(bitcents) and red(satoshis) are a little different - I've put the c & s on the right side of the corresponding coin image too.


Below is an outline of the scheme I had in mind.
I'm hoping something like this might be picked up as a standard across shopping carts, wallet software etc..
My apologies if something like this is already out there - I couldn't find it.
Feedback on whether my choice of colours is good/awful welcome.
Any GUI builders interested in incorporating this and helping evangelize it as a standard?

EDIT: to make this clearer, I'm not suggesting that a particular displayed amount would be shown multicoloured as it is in the image below.
That's just to show where the divisions lie and help people understand the units.


EDIT: changed satoshis from red to black - because satoshi is surely some sort of ninja.
oh.. and because it might help red-green colourblind people, and because some people are averse to rainbows.

As far as the psychological impediment to dealing in fractions of a bitcoin - I'm hoping that if there was a widely understood naming and colour scheme - that things such as the blue millicoin or  green uBTC would feel like tradable units in their own right  more than just some number with a bunch of leading zeroes.
It should theoretically help reduce errors, especially for newcomers to bitcoin.


Feel free to throw me a few greenies if you like the idea
svg version avail here: http://precisium.com.au/images/bitcoin/units/chart.svg
Thanks to bitboy for the svg version of the gold bitcoin. ( from http://forum.bitcoin.org/?topic=1756.0)

Cheers,
Julz
1BxNJBTXrZqFjdtAh6cdanALxDddm6jxZa

+1 to javascript.
It's a language that has been underappreciated, miscategorized and misunderstood for many years.. but is finally getting the recognition it deserves.  If any language is going to take off 'bitcoin style' .. it'll be javascript.
Serverside JS is an awesome development that has only just begun.