I think my main gripes now are simply that you can't fix the units easily. You either have to keep a "bits" to BTC conversion program open in another window, or just throw out all notions of BTC and imagine that "bits" are a thing.
When you see 'bits', think 'uBTC' and you'll be fine. They are the same. Millionths of a bitcoin.
If I imagine that thousands of "bits" are mBTC I can sorta get by. Still, it doesn't explain why this website invents a new and obnoxious unit and won't let us set the right units in our preferences.
Just imagine that 1 bit = 1 uBTC.
MoneyPot didn't invest 'bits' as a synonym for uBTC, it just adopted the practice. I could make a bunch of screenshots of its use around the web, but you could just go visit the sites. People have given you enough examples of popular sites that use it.
The free gift at moneypot is 2 uBTC, or 2 bits. The general public isn't comfortable with SI prefixed. Sure they mostly get that "kilo" means a thousand, but that's about it. You would be surprised how many people don't know the difference between "milli" and "micro". They're both small, right? And why do people sometimes write the u in uBTC in a weird way? And why 'u' anyway when it sounds like it's spelled with an 'm'? And so on.
They could have used BTC, but then the free gift is 0.000002 BTC. At a glance that is pretty hard to distinguish from 0.00002 BTC or 0.0000002 BTC. Nobody wants to be counting zeroes all the time. And so we were stuck: we either use silly long strings of zeroes which aren't overly intuitive, or we use Greek prefixes which are easily confused. That's why "bit" makes sense. It's a shame that it's such an overloaded word. It even already has many conflicting
monetary meanings but it's more approachable for most people than the other commonly used alternatives.
So there's the kind of weirdness I'm talking about. This guy says multiply BTC x100 and that will be your amount in satoshis! WTF! I appreciate that the dev of the game seemed to admit that he needs to do this. I'm not sure how this "bits" thing got started or why he says that other sites are using it (I've only seen it here). But it *is* really embarrassing. I don't think I'll play more until the units get fixed.
It's hard to tell whether you're playing dumb for effect or not. I'm sure you must understand already.
He was saying that "x bits" is the same value as "100x satoshis", since each bit is 100 satoshis. The first place I saw "bits" mentioned was in
this reddit post from 27 Nov 2013. (Or Nov 27 2013. Or 2013-11-27. I'm not sure which
one true date format you believe in). I don't know if that's where it got started. Ryan is presumably saying that other sites use it because other sites use it. I see it regularly. Most recently I read
a blog post from bitpay about their new "Bitcore Wallet Suite" which uses the concept of bits as a synonym for uBTC throughout.
Moneypot has defined a unit "bits" which is equal to 100 satoshis. I've finally learned this although I can't imagine why this is helpful to anyone.
Moneypot didn't define the unit. It was a term in use before Moneypot ever existed.
Hopefully my rambling post has helped you understand the problem that "bits" are intended to solve.
