What's your favorite naming convention for mBTC, and uBTC?

[integrity42]

Obviously this debate will rage on for a while until the market itself decides.... but it's always interesting to see the current trends.

Vote away!!

[tinytiger]

You are missing one option: "None of the above."

[empoweoqwj]

You are missing one option: "None of the above."

Definitely "they are bitcoins". End of story. Who needs all these ridiculous sub-divisions. Confuse the hell out of my gran I can tell ya

[Desensitizer]

I would say hands down BTC and then .0XX01 denominations. Newcomers will find mBTC and uBTC a little confusing and sometime I forgot what they stand for. This isn't even considering the more uncommon denominations. However, what I do think would be nice to make things more clear are more integrated BTC to USD/EURO/RUS converters. That way people have an easier way of visualizing what .0158 bitcoins is actually worth.

[betyourbits]

I prefer mBTC, it's what we use at betyourbits.  Only time will tell, I'd imagine if mass adoption truly happened we'd end up using satoshis.

[Tomatocage]

Dust

[BlueNote]

I'm a big fan of using bits and Satoshis for the sub-units, calling the 4th decimal place a bit as it neatly divides the range in half.

It seems obvious to me that a BIT (that would be the symbol) should be the standard unit of BITcoin so that we can deal with whole numbers and only two names for the rest of this adventure, but this is not like having the Satoshi unit naming convention catch on. That was simple to do in a decentralized fashion because there's no reason for anyone to argue against it once it started being used. It honors the founder, and there's no incentive to name the smallest unit anything else.

But people have different preferences for the front of the range, and since there is no Bitcoin company with a marketing team to lead the way, it will probably just default to millibits because it's an accessible unit at this stage. If the whole bitcoin remains the standard unit, then we will always be dealing with numbers like ".00002003" and ".01395706" for BTC, and then clunky metric terms for sub-units that really don't belong in a currency. That actually sets Bitcoin apart. It's almost like that's what you'd expect if a robot implemented the currency! Humans tend to give colorful individual names to currency divisions - the Satoshi being the perfect example of that.

We'll be forever checking how many zeroes there are to the right of the decimal when we make a transaction in BTC, and that just gets tedious. It's easy to screw up and be off by a factor of 10 or even 100, and people have already done so. If you use whole numbers, then you can also use commas or spaces in the display as we typically do for large numbers. It's more visually appealing and less chance for confusion.

It's immediately apparent to the human eye that 3,000 bits is not 300 bits or 30 bits. A whole bitcoin would be 10,000 bits, and that's as big as the number ever gets. Same with Satoshis. You always have whole numbers and then you switch to the higher naming convention at 10,000. And with such a wide range, it wouldn't be necessary to use ANY decimal places. People would just round off due to the incredibly small value of one ten-thousandth being the smallest part of that particular range. Imagine, no decimals! ("You might say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.")

But I guess this kind of simplicity and utility is a lost cause in the leaderless Bitcoin environment. Getting people to adopt one approach is like herding cats...

[empoweoqwj]

I'm a big fan of using bits and Satoshis for the sub-units, calling the 4th decimal place a bit as it neatly divides the range in half.

It seems obvious to me that a BIT (that would be the symbol) should be the standard unit of BITcoin so that we can deal with whole numbers and only two names for the rest of this adventure, but this is not like having the Satoshi unit naming convention catch on. That was simple to do in a decentralized fashion because there's no reason for anyone to argue against it once it started being used. It honors the founder, and there's no incentive to name the smallest unit anything else.

But people have different preferences for the front of the range, and since there is no Bitcoin company with a marketing team to lead the way, it will probably just default to millibits because it's an accessible unit at this stage. If the whole bitcoin remains the standard unit, then we will always be dealing with numbers like ".00002003" and ".01395706" for BTC, and then clunky metric terms for sub-units that really don't belong in a currency. That actually sets Bitcoin apart. It's almost like that's what you'd expect if a robot implemented the currency! Humans tend to give colorful individual names to currency divisions - the Satoshi being the perfect example of that.

We'll be forever checking how many zeroes there are to the right of the decimal when we make a transaction in BTC, and that just gets tedious. It's easy to screw up and be off by a factor of 10 or even 100, and people have already done so. If you use whole numbers, then you can also use commas or spaces in the display as we typically do for large numbers. It's more visually appealing and less chance for confusion.

It's immediately apparent to the human eye that 3,000 bits is not 300 bits or 30 bits. A whole bitcoin would be 10,000 bits, and that's as big as the number ever gets. Same with Satoshis. You always have whole numbers and then you switch to the higher naming convention at 10,000. And with such a wide range, it wouldn't be necessary to use ANY decimal places. People would just round off due to the incredibly small value of one ten-thousandth being the smallest part of that particular range. Imagine, no decimals! ("You might say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one.")

But I guess this kind of simplicity and utility is a lost cause in the leaderless Bitcoin environment. Getting people to adopt one approach is like herding cats...

Your last paragraph hits the nail on the head. We can discuss this till the cows come home but without leadership, nothing will be decided, and we will be left with the status quo. I do love the name "Satoshi" as a unit, so much preferable to mBTC or uBTC (puke), but the problem is its so small. I don't want to buy a pint of beer with 6M satoshis. You'd be back to checking zeros again, just this time in front of the decimal point.

[integrity42]

You are missing one option: "None of the above."

It's there.  simply use BTC with zeros.

[monkeybars]

mills and mikes

[zimmah]

I would say hands down BTC and then .0XX01 denominations. Newcomers will find mBTC and uBTC a little confusing and sometime I forgot what they stand for. This isn't even considering the more uncommon denominations. However, what I do think would be nice to make things more clear are more integrated BTC to USD/EURO/RUS converters. That way people have an easier way of visualizing what .0158 bitcoins is actually worth.

you're probably american, because the rest of the world is pretty much used to using the metric system (including m and µ) in everyday life.

It's not much different from using dollars and cents. Instead of cents (from centi, meaning 1/100 (also 'per cent' comes from this word)) you have mills (from milli, meaning 1/1000) and mikes (from micro, meaning 1/1,000,000) if we ever need to we could even go as far as using nanos/naan/nans or something (from nano meaning 1/1,000,000,000) or picos/pics (from pico, meaning 1/1,000,000,000,000) there's a whole lot more but these will probably be sufficient for the next couple of decades.

(there's still femto, atto, zepto, and yocto left, i'm not sure if there's anything after yocto but then again it may never even be needed)

[empoweoqwj]

I would say hands down BTC and then .0XX01 denominations. Newcomers will find mBTC and uBTC a little confusing and sometime I forgot what they stand for. This isn't even considering the more uncommon denominations. However, what I do think would be nice to make things more clear are more integrated BTC to USD/EURO/RUS converters. That way people have an easier way of visualizing what .0158 bitcoins is actually worth.

you're probably american, because the rest of the world is pretty much used to using the metric system (including m and µ) in everyday life.

It's not much different from using dollars and cents. Instead of cents (from centi, meaning 1/100 (also 'per cent' comes from this word)) you have mills (from milli, meaning 1/1000) and mikes (from micro, meaning 1/1,000,000) if we ever need to we could even go as far as using nanos/naan/nans or something (from nano meaning 1/1,000,000,000) or picos/pics (from pico, meaning 1/1,000,000,000,000) there's a whole lot more but these will probably be sufficient for the next couple of decades.

(there's still femto, atto, zepto, and yocto left, i'm not sure if there's anything after yocto but then again it may never even be needed)

Yep. No confusion will come out of all those names for sure.