Tonal BitCoin benefits & neutrality

[Luke-Jr]

This "Tonal Bitcoin" stuff is just stupid. "Bong-BitCoin" indeed!

Just as "stupid" as Spanish is to the ignorant American who thinks everyone should speak English. In reality, if you actually took the time to learn Tonal, you'd realize that it is in fact Decimal and SI that is truly stupid. (Yet I'm not demanding everyone drop Decimal BitCoin support just because I don't like it)

The Nystrom representation itself isn't stupid, but using it for Bitcoin is. It brings absolutely nothing worthwhile to Bitcoin.

One bitcoin is 100000000 units of bitdust, and the maximum number of bitcoins is 21000000, both of which are convenient decimal numbers. What's the point of having one Bong-Bitcoin equal to 42.94967296 BTC?

If you do want to count bitcoins in hexadecimal, you should simply use the equivalent number in base 16. For example, 255 BTC = 0xFF BTC.

More like, it brings BitCoin to the Tonal system. The Tonal system itself is also worthwhile-- but admittedly, TBC does nothing for people who are content just continuing to use Decimal (except developers, who get a method to ensure their code is properly abstracted).

One decimal BitCoin is 100,000,000 units of "bitdust", because it is a decimal unit system. The maximum number of bitcoins in decimal is in fact 20,999,999.9769, which is only convenient to round to 21 million. On the other hand, each tonal bitcoin is 1,0000 (65,536 decimal) units of "bitdust" (aka TBCᵇ), which is convenient because it is a tonal unit. The maximum tonal bitcoins is 7,750,54.00, which actually has an ending 0 unlike the decimal equivalent.

There are numerous reasons making 1 BTC = 1 TBC would be confusing and in general a bad idea:

• It would lead people to think 10 TBC = 10 BTC, when it is in fact 16 BTC
• It would be impossible to determine what unit system the value was intended to be used with. As defined today, there is a simple mathematical test to determine if any given number of "bitdust" represents a BTC or TBC value.
• 1 BTC only allows for 21 million "normal" units. There are almost 7 billion people. If BitCoin ever gains widespread adoption, the present size of TBC will be much better suited for everyday spending/trading. BTC, on the other hand, will need to re-base (or else everyone will just be using μBTC instead).
• 1 BTC is, as you stated, based on 100,000,000 base units. This is the awkward number of 55,100 base units in Tonal, and not very sensible for a Tonal unit (which are calculated in a useful way).
• 1 BTC can only be divided into 100 Tonal units. This would make it completely unworkable when/if BitCoin reaches critical mass to require rebasing.

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[davout]

Tonal system sounds pretty complicated...
Is it a base 16 system ?
How do you count to 10 or 100 (decimal) with it ?

[Luke-Jr]

Tonal system sounds pretty complicated...
Is it a base 16 system ?
How do you count to 10 or 100 (decimal) with it ?

Yes, from a decimal perspective it is base sixteen. There is a learning curve for someone used to decimal, but given a fair comparison,  it is actually much easier in practice.

Decimal	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	11	12	13	14	15	16
Tonal	0	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8		9						10
Pronunciation	Noll	An	De	Ti	Go	Su	By	Ra	Me	Ni	Ko	Hu	Vy	La	Po	Fy	Ton
-
Decimal	96	97	98	99	100	101	102	103	104	105	106	107	108	109	110	111	112
Tonal	60	61	62	63	64	65	66	67	68	6	69	6	6	6	6	6	70
Pronunciation	By-ton	By-ton-an	By-ton-de	By-ton-ti	By-ton-go	By-ton-su	By-ton-by	By-ton-ra	By-ton-me	By-ton-ni	By-ton-ko	By-ton-hu	By-ton-vy	By-ton-la	By-ton-po	By-ton-fy	Ra-ton
-
Decimal	248	249	250	251	252	253	254	255	256	257	258	259	260	261	262	263	264
Tonal	8		9						100	101	102	103	104	105	106	107	108
Pronunciation	Fy-ton-me	Fy-ton-ni	Fy-ton-ko	Fy-ton-hu	Fy-ton-vy	Fy-ton-la	Fy-ton-po	Fy-ton-fy	San	San-an	San-de	San-ti	San-go	San-su	San-by	San-ra	San-me

[zipslack]

There is a learning curve for someone used to decimal, but given a fair comparison,  it is actually much easier in practice.

Can you point us to such a comparison? I've been trying to withhold my judgement but it's hard.

[Luke-Jr]

There is a learning curve for someone used to decimal, but given a fair comparison,  it is actually much easier in practice.

Can you point us to such a comparison? I've been trying to withhold my judgement but it's hard.

I'm not aware of any formal studies, if you mean that. The easy example I usually use is asking you, as a human, to fold a paper into 10 equal pieces without any tools to assist you in measurement; then try folding into 16 equal pieces. This demonstrates that even though you have (presumably) grown up with decimal, you can still work better with tonal in practice. If you don't want to waste 2 papers, http://www.intuitor.com/hex/switch.html has a Java applet demonstrating the same in software (but for hexadecimal, which shares this same benefit as tonal).

[casascius]

I'm not aware of any formal studies, if you mean that. The easy example I usually use is asking you, as a human, to fold a paper into 10 equal pieces without any tools to assist you in measurement; then try folding into 16 equal pieces. This demonstrates that even though you have (presumably) grown up with decimal, you can still work better with tonal in practice. If you don't want to waste 2 papers, http://www.intuitor.com/hex/switch.html has a Java applet demonstrating the same in software (but for hexadecimal, which shares this same benefit as tonal).

If you want to teach people what essentially amounts to counting in binary, start an education reform agenda.  Persuade teachers to teach the binary code to young children.  Until then, leave Bitcoin alone with it.  This is wholly impractical nonsense, and you should not pollute Bitcoin with it.  I think the world would benefit greatly if kids could natively count in hex, but this is a frivolous attempt to make that happen.

The purpose of Bitcoin is to offer the world a competing store of value, not to compel them to switch to count in hexadecimal and to use a foreign language for doing so.  This is a world where the vast majority of its inhabitants are completely comfortable counting in base ten.  Kudos to Satoshi for defining base-ten fractions as the de facto fraction for Bitcoin.

[Luke-Jr]

If you want to teach people what essentially amounts to counting in binary, start an education reform agenda.  Persuade teachers to teach the binary code to young children.  Until then, leave Bitcoin alone with it.  This is wholly impractical nonsense, and you should not pollute Bitcoin with it.  I think the world would benefit greatly if kids could natively count in hex, but this is a frivolous attempt to make that happen.

The purpose of Bitcoin is to offer the world a competing store of value, not to compel them to switch to count in hexadecimal and to use a foreign language for doing so.  This is a world where the vast majority of its inhabitants are completely comfortable counting in base ten.  Kudos to Satoshi for defining base-ten fractions as the de facto fraction for Bitcoin.

If you believe the "education" systems (in any country) are useful at all, you're quite frankly deluded. If anyone learns anything in them, it's because of the rare teacher who cares, or the rare student who seeks knowledge. The only real teachers are parents. I am one of those real teachers, and I am sticking to Tonal. Bitcoin is a useful to tonal users because it allows us to exchange currency in our native/preferred number system, rather than have to work in decimal for monetary exchanges (even with others who hate decimal).

Remember, Decimal BitCoin doesn't cease to exist because of Tonal BitCoin. Your irrational/fanatical oppression is not helpful. Use what you want, but let us use what we want. BitCoin can either gain the adoption of the Tonal community, or lose it by insisting we all switch to decimal (in which case, there is frankly no benefit over our local fiat currencies-- why switch at all when more people accept the fiat?). If BitCoin only appeals to the libertarian niche, it will never gain widespread adoption. You (and others) need to recognize that if you want BitCoin to succeed, you must be open to ideals that don't appeal to you personally.

[casascius]

You (and others) need to recognize that if you want BitCoin to succeed, you must be open to ideals that don't appeal to you personally.

so if I want Bitcoin to succeed, I need to start using the character "9" to mean the quantity ten.  Hmph, I'll pass.  My kids will learn that it means nine. 

[slush]

What is all this stuff for? What's wrong on decimals? And no, I'm not American.

How many fingers do you have?

[dirtyfilthy]

Can't you just fork the bitcoin client, implement tonal bit coins, and then everyone(?) who wants to use tonal can use it and we can stop having this pointless discussion. It's all binary underneath anyway, how you display the numbers is a purely cosmetic change. 

[Luke-Jr]

You (and others) need to recognize that if you want BitCoin to succeed, you must be open to ideals that don't appeal to you personally.

so if I want Bitcoin to succeed, I need to start using the character "9" to mean the quantity ten.  Hmph, I'll pass.  My kids will learn that it means nine. 

No, you can use whatever you want. But at least don't oppress those who choose to use "9" to mean the quantity of 8+2. Actually, it should be a "", but "9" is tolerated and I didn't feel like having and extra "9" key somewhere for decimal. When teaching, I always make sure I do a proper "" (with a full 6-like loop) for the Tonal digit "ko".

What is all this stuff for? What's wrong on decimals? And no, I'm not American.

How many fingers do you have?

Decimal is unnatural for humans. Finger count is irrelevant. Should we use base 20 because of our toes? If you really want to count on your fingers, base 5 is better than base 10-- you can read 55 (35 decimal) that way. Or binary, then you can hit 11111111 (255 deci) without trouble (due to finger dynamics, I find it difficult to use the ring finger). I personally use binary for finger counting, each hand representing a single Tonal digit.

Can't you just fork the bitcoin client, implement tonal bit coins, and then everyone(?) who wants to use tonal can use it and we can stop having this pointless discussion. It's all binary underneath anyway, how you display the numbers is a purely cosmetic change. 

I agree, it should be. However, right now, it isn't all (simply) binary underneath. It's an encoded floating-point Decimal BitCoin value at the RPC level. This creates problems for Decimal as well, since the common decimal number of 0.1 cannot be represented by floats. But that's another topic.

[Luke-Jr]

actually in bitcoin it's an int
in ur os it's binary (or hex in ass)
in ur cpu it's binary

I was referring to the RPC layer, which is internals.