oh I see there's a "mike" but I don't like the spelling
Same here! I think shortening "
micro" to "
mike" just doesn't make sense in any language... except English.
It should be "
mic".
I believe if they're officially called millibitcoins and microbitcoins, "millies" and "micros" will become colloquially common anyway in every-day street language.
There need to be three things:
(A) The official word / long form: This is definitely "millibitcoin" / "microbitcoin". I haven't seen much other proposals.
(B) Informal / colloquial terms: That's what most discussion goes about. But I think it's the least important one. What sense does it make to convince
complete strangers on the internet what their new slang word should be? That's just wasting time!
(C) The official abbreviation / short form: I think that this is what most discussion
should go about. Yet, I've seen only very few posts about it.
Currently, the Bitcoin Core reference client uses "mBTC" and "µBTC".
I think that this is actually wrong (Yes, it's a bug!), because the SI prefixes should be applied to units of measurement (which are normally lowercase or have
at most one uppercase letter), and
not three letter currency codes, which are all uppercase.
I mean, the units to which SI prefixes are normally applied look like this:
1 kW = 1 kilowatt
1 hPa = 1 hectopascal
1 GHz = 1 gigahertz
These units
never have multiple uppercase letters, so BTC just doesn't fit in there. We need something lowercase.
This is how other lowercase units are abbreviated:
1 second = 1 sec.
1 minute = 1 min.
Following this logic, we get:
1 mbitcoin = 1 mbit.
1 µbitcoin = 1 µbit.
→
Therefore, my suggestion is to use "mbit." and "µbit." instead of "mBTC" and "µBTC" as the official abbreviation for "millibitcoin" and "microbitcoin".Hopefully, "µbit" is a fair compromise for most of the colloquial terms that are floating around. Everyone could "read out of it" what they like most,
i.e. µbit somewhat suggests all of these:
micro,
mic,
mike,
ubit,
bit...