How much is 1 bit?

[knightcoin]

megabit and kilobit could also be confusing as they are already used for hard drive sizes and they use the 1024 base system instead of the 1000 base. Which means a megabit (hard drive size) is 1.048.576 bits

I am actually with the Hard drive manufactures on this one. Many GNU/Linux distributions have converted to Binary prefixes, though I don't think Windows or BSD have.

Also, a byte is not always 8 bits. For example, the ASCII character set is 7 bit and may be transmitted over the wire as such (if you really want to; generally 8 bit bytes are used for modem use)

Some older 36-bit computers used 9-bit bytes, and there were also systems that had byte sizes of 6 or 7 bits, or even variable-sized bytes. For this reason, many people, especially techie professionals, prefer the term octet, which clearly and unambiguously implies “eight”. This term is much more common outside North America.

- Binary Information and Representation: Bits, Bytes, Nibbles, Octets and Characters

nice info; thanks ...

about tcp, reminds the time I was good at doing subneting without calc, pencil paper ...all done just in my mind... now I can even remember what just wrote 30 minutes ago ... but talking about manufactures I think the biggest lesson we can learn about is to avoid "locked in" trap ... I think that's the main reason google a big Intel customer to choose IBM's OpenPower Foundation ... and that's what we all up to ... against monopoly and 51% attacks ...    

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[jbreher]

Which means a megabit (hard drive size) is 1.048.576 bits

Just no.

All standards organizations (ANSI, ISO, BSI, IEC, ...) are unanimous on this matter. A megabit is 10^6 bits. Period. The prefix you are looking for is 'Mebi' - 2^20. True, then ignorant misuse kilo as if it is 1024, mega as if it is 1,048,576, etc. But it is not. End of story.