A proposal: Forget about mBTC and switch directly to Satoshis

[OleOle]

Maybe we can move beyond all these comments and put the matter to a vote? The title of the thread essentially requests a yes or no answer, sure there is room for other suggestions and if anyone wanted to put a vote topic together collating the suggestions on this thread, it might be easier if people voted so that we can get a snapshot of what people think as a whole rather than endless variations being discussed here which aren't really all that individually relevant unless they happen to become the dominant viewpoint.

For what it is worth (and that's not very much) I'd say Yes, forget about mBTC and switch directly to Satoshis.

Why? Well, the finance sector doesn't even use BTC, it uses XBT so if we're going to go mainstream with bitcoins, new adopters won't have a clue what mBTC is, they might not even know exactly what BTC is because the increasingly internationally accepted term is XBT. It's easy to then explain that Satoshis are parts of a bitcoin named after the guy who created them.

Check out 'The World's Favorite Currency Site' www.xe.com it includes bitcoins, type 'XBT' or even 'bitcoin' into the converter field, up it comes, type 'BTC' into it and it defaults back to XBT.

Anyway, on a scale of one to ten on whether I care what they're called, it's a three or maybe a two

[1714988891]

1714988891

[MoonShadow]

Maybe we can move beyond all these comments and put the matter to a vote?

It doesn't really matter what we do here.  It's not really up to us.  The membership who would vote on such a thing, in an obscure forum, in a particular thread, have no more authority to make any such determination than a church business meeting in Kansas has any authority to vote on the legality of pot in Germany.  No one gives a shit, and our opinion matters not at all.

In the long run, the market will tell us what the answer is.

[jambola2]

I prefer metric .
I would love to see micro after the milli , and maybe some popularity for centibitcoins.
Satoshis are too small and confusing in my opinion.

[crazy_rabbit]

Satoshis are too small to switch to for the near future. mBTC makes total sense though.

[finder_keeper]

I've made a (somewhat silly) attempt at making mBTC sound a bit less abstruse:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327752.msg3518845#msg3518845

[MaxBTC1]

Im with you on this OP.

I tell my friends about bitcoin and they go 'well it costs over $300' how can I afford that???

I try to explain that, no, you don't need a whole one, and yes, you can buy half or a quater or whatever.
Hopeless.

[laowai80]

Have to do it gradually, amounts measured in mBTC look natural to the eye at this moment of time.

But micro is too small, not to mention satoshi, those would be cumbersome to count in at this point.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Im with you on this OP.

I tell my friends about bitcoin and they go 'well it costs over $300' how can I afford that???

I try to explain that, no, you don't need a whole one, and yes, you can buy half or a quater or whatever.
Hopeless.

Tell them a mBTC is only $0.30 and it can be used anywhere that takes BTC so they can buy thousands of them. 

[integrity42]

Great, so those same "humans" would rather have 1000000000000000 B disk drives, right?

You don't write 1000000000000000 B.  You write 1 TB.

You don't write 100,000,000 S. You write 1 Ms.

Hopefully that clears things up.

[integrity42]

I prefer metric .
I would love to see micro after the milli , and maybe some popularity for centibitcoins.
Satoshis are too small and confusing in my opinion.

Satoshi are the base unit.  If you want to do 'metric' you have to use satoshis.

BTC was arbitrarily chosen by satoshi to be 100,000,000 satoshis. BTC breaks orders of magnitude, not satoshis.

[integrity42]

Satoshis are too small to switch to for the near future. mBTC makes total sense though.

Theres no difference in writing 0.1 Ms, 100Ks, or 1mBTC.

But there is a difference in using mBTC just to throw it away later.  Using satoshi's solves that problem.

[zeetubes]

FWIW I tried explaining bitcoins to a bank manager in Malaysia yesterday. All was going well until I told her what the current price was and you could tell she had lost interest. If BTC/XBT hits $1K then human psychology is going to kick in as a barrier to acceptance for the average Joe and Jane. It probably would have been better if the value of satoshis and BTC were reversed, then we could talk in MBTC, GBTC like disk space.  I think this is an urgent issue and one of the most pressing for the (healthy) future of bitcoins. If a new and sensible naming convention can be decided upon, it will be a very positive step.

[DeathAndTaxes]

I think this is an urgent issue and one of the most pressing for the (healthy) future of bitcoins.

Lolz.  If you think this is the biggest challenge facing mass adoption of Bitcoin well all I got to say is lolz.

In the meantime tell your bank manager a "millibit" is still under a buck.

[DeathAndTaxes]

Theres no difference in writing 0.1 Ms, 100Ks, or 1mBTC.

But there is a difference in using mBTC just to throw it away later.  Using satoshi's solves that problem.

Who says it will be thrown away later?  Isn't this kinda a carriage before the horse thinking.  Even if it is "thrown away" later ... later might be decades from now. 

[zeetubes]

"Lolz.  If you think this is the biggest challenge facing mass adoption of Bitcoin well all I got to say is lolz."

The only other barriers are technology, regulation and politics. The average end user has zero input into any of those areas. Unless the average end user feels comfortable with BTC it will die a death. Period. But I'll eagerly await your inspired insights.

[DeathAndTaxes]

"Lolz.  If you think this is the biggest challenge facing mass adoption of Bitcoin well all I got to say is lolz."

The only other barriers are technology, regulation and politics. The average end user has zero input into any of those areas. Unless the average end user feels comfortable with BTC it will die a death. Period. But I'll eagerly await your inspired insights.

So Bitcoin will die from being too valuable.   Has that ever happened to anything ever in the history of mankind.

If less people adopted Bitcoin wouldn't the price go down?  If the price goes down wouldn't Bitcoin be less valuable and thus solve the problem of dying from being too valuable?

The idea that something can both be excessively valuable and die is ... well silly.  Lots of things could kill Bitcoin, it being too valuable isn't one of them.

[zeetubes]

True, but I'm not worried about bitcoins being too valuable; I'd like that a lot in fact. But at the moment for most buyers, BTC is an investment and speculation vehicle, not a parallel way for everyday people to buy and sell stuff. Widespread acceptance requires that the average user and merchant/seller feel at least as comfortable as buying something at Amazon or Ebay. And first they have to buy some bitcoins. And that will require something that they can easily understand. I like the intent of this thread (thanks OP) and hopefully the BTC gods are also thinking this through. If I had been able to tell the bank manager that she could buy a (fractional) BTC for a few bucks, the veil may have stayed up. 

[BitCloud]

FWIW I tried explaining bitcoins to a bank manager in Malaysia yesterday. All was going well until I told her what the current price was and you could tell she had lost interest. If BTC/XBT hits $1K then human psychology is going to kick in as a barrier to acceptance for the average Joe and Jane.

The satoshi idea is nice... but:

people keep on buying Berkshire Hathaway stock at around $100k a share

1 BTC becoming more and more expensive will turn it into a diamond like asset

keep BTC unique and let it flourish.

[MoonShadow]

Again, it doesn't matter what we decide to do here.  Literally no one, inside or outside of this forum, gives a flying f##k what our opinion on the proper bitcoin unit may be.

Including me.

[beetcoin]

FWIW I tried explaining bitcoins to a bank manager in Malaysia yesterday. All was going well until I told her what the current price was and you could tell she had lost interest. If BTC/XBT hits $1K then human psychology is going to kick in as a barrier to acceptance for the average Joe and Jane.

The satoshi idea is nice... but:

people keep on buying Berkshire Hathaway stock at around $100k a share

1 BTC becoming more and more expensive will turn it into a diamond like asset

keep BTC unique and let it flourish.

well, the problem is that people don't really "spend" diamonds; they just store it away. if that were to happen to BTC, it would be a predominantly speculative currency/commodity.