May be a silly question, but it's been bugging me since getting into this.

[synapse81]

I know bitcoin is on the rise.


My question is, aside from the few that are buying and holding and those that are using it because it's the only digital currency they know about at the time that has a lot of steam and following, how are every day people going to respond to it? It's great for those that are holding and causing the price to go up for their own benefit (I'm one of them taking the chance), but do you think the general public are going to walk around and pay for things in decimal? How annoying is that? An annoyance like that could be the death of bitcoin and allow another coin with more and friendlier units take over.

"I'll take a whatever burger and fries and a large fresca"

"That'll be .0048 please." "-Swipes card- Heres .0055, keep the change, thanks"

Is this not looking like a massive issue to anyone else?

[aTriz]

Well, there are more units of Bitcoin than just Bitcoin itself, for some smaller transactions people like to use mBTC, which are millibits. 1000 mBTC make up one Bitcoin, so using today's prices a burger would cost around 3-5 mBTC, seems better than 0.004 right. If you want to go even smaller there are uBTC (one millionth of a bitcoin) and satoshis which are 0.00000001BTC.

Don't think Bitcoin will be going mainstream anytime soon, we already have a pretty congested blockchain and if the whole world started using it a confirmation would take 2 hours to go through and everything would be slow.   

[electronicash]

one who would be dealing with BTC every day would probably prefer the decimal, its easier to know its not huge than having to hear someone telling me he is sending 500k satoshi. decimals indicate its just partial of 1 btc.

[franky1]

'bits'

which is 100 sats
also displayed as 0.00000100 btc for 1 bit

so instead of $3 being 0.00100000btc (0.001)  it would be
100000bits

[hilariousetc]

Do you think the general public are going to walk around and pay for things in decimal? How annoying is that? An annoyance like that could be the death of bitcoin and allow another coin with more and friendlier units take over.

"I'll take a whatever burger and fries and a large fresca"

"That'll be .0048 please." "-Swipes card- Heres .0055, keep the change, thanks"

Is this not looking like a massive issue to anyone else?

Because it's not an issue at all. When you buy pretty much anything with bitcoin the items are listed in your local fiat value so this isn't a problem at all. If something costs $4.99 then you will scan the qr code and send $4.99 in bitcoin. I think some people just like to create problems where there are none and there's far more important things to worry about regarding mainstream adoption.

[ClvrGmr]

I know bitcoin is on the rise.


My question is, aside from the few that are buying and holding and those that are using it because it's the only digital currency they know about at the time that has a lot of steam and following, how are every day people going to respond to it? It's great for those that are holding and causing the price to go up for their own benefit (I'm one of them taking the chance), but do you think the general public are going to walk around and pay for things in decimal? How annoying is that? An annoyance like that could be the death of bitcoin and allow another coin with more and friendlier units take over.

"I'll take a whatever burger and fries and a large fresca"

"That'll be .0048 please." "-Swipes card- Heres .0055, keep the change, thanks"

Is this not looking like a massive issue to anyone else?

I got your point but that is quite unnecessary. Why? Because suffixes for the most part are invented and used widely to around the world to simplify such numbers. For example, also in digital world if i have 1 Terabyte Hard Drive its annoying to say I particularly have 1,000,000,000,000 bytes right? it cost to much effort to say and would likely be hard to compute because of too many digits essentially involve.

These things are the way the world works. If its really hard then invent something that will literally ease it. So if someday bitcoin will for the most part be used to particularly daily living, trading, lending, etc. we will absolutely find a way to solve this problem but it won''t take long time that it would start to make bitcoin die.

[Taras]

mBTC has been brought up already, but I personally don't mind thinking in terms of whole bitcoins with items that aren't very expensive. 0.0048 BTC isn't any harder to imagine than 4.8 mBTC. When you get really infinitesimal, then counting in bits or satoshi sounds like a better idea, but for everyday things I think the decimal is fine and that this is just sort of an invented problem.

[dothebeats]

Or better yet propose another unit of bitcoin other than using decimals to represent it. If the metric system has centi, milli, deci and deca, the same principle could be applied to bitcoin like mBTC, uBTC, etc.

This isn't really much of a problem. I think most people with OCD are just the ones being problematic about it.

[bamboylee]

It is not a problem to me, you get used to it. You are just inventing superficial problems. What matters is functionality and security. Bitcoin will not be overthrown by an alt with lesser decimal places in its units but with a faster, effective and scalable chain.

[The One]

I know bitcoin is on the rise.


My question is, aside from the few that are buying and holding and those that are using it because it's the only digital currency they know about at the time that has a lot of steam and following, how are every day people going to respond to it? It's great for those that are holding and causing the price to go up for their own benefit (I'm one of them taking the chance), but do you think the general public are going to walk around and pay for things in decimal? How annoying is that? An annoyance like that could be the death of bitcoin and allow another coin with more and friendlier units take over.

"I'll take a whatever burger and fries and a large fresca"

"That'll be .0048 please." "-Swipes card- Heres .0055, keep the change, thanks"

Is this not looking like a massive issue to anyone else?

The general public already do pay using decimal. A penny/cent to 99 pence/cents is decimal.


Very clever... another "Bitcoin is dead" post.

[cointabo]

I know bitcoin is on the rise.


My question is, aside from the few that are buying and holding and those that are using it because it's the only digital currency they know about at the time that has a lot of steam and following, how are every day people going to respond to it? It's great for those that are holding and causing the price to go up for their own benefit (I'm one of them taking the chance), but do you think the general public are going to walk around and pay for things in decimal? How annoying is that? An annoyance like that could be the death of bitcoin and allow another coin with more and friendlier units take over.

"I'll take a whatever burger and fries and a large fresca"

"That'll be .0048 please." "-Swipes card- Heres .0055, keep the change, thanks"

Is this not looking like a massive issue to anyone else?

SO many wallets convert FIAT value to satoshis and vice versa automatically. Also you can name it in mBits and satoshis for convinience like "4500 sats"

[Hydrogen]

"I'll take a whatever burger and fries and a large fresca"

"That'll be .0048 please." "-Swipes card- Heres .0055, keep the change, thanks"

Is this not looking like a massive issue to anyone else?

Its little different from spending $0.48, €0.48 or £0.48.

Most grew up using fractional amounts of fiat.

Fractional sums of crypto are a new format they have less experience with.

Give it a few years, it'll become as mundane as using decimal amounts of fiat cash.