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.
Ok, that's a good point, but I still don't understand why the website doesn't want to fix the problem so that people can use the units they want. You already have to sign in, why not let people annoyed by the "bits" lingo turn it off?
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.
I think that people use u for micro because usual abbreviation for micro is mu and lower-case mu looks a little like a u with a tail on the left (so at some point 'u' became something like an ascii mu, I guess).
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.
I think that my main gripe about it is that its such an overloaded word, especially in the context of bitcoin where we send transaction and the size of that transaction in bits affects the transaction fee we usually pay.
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.
I guess you may be right that they didn't define this unit but they happen to be the only site where I've seen it in use (perhaps I'm just underexposed to certain sites). I think I could see your issue about counting zeros except that if for some reason uBTC is too opaque then you could just use Satoshis, which is straightforward.
Again, I think that given how easy it is when you already have to let people create profiles and establish preferences, to simply set their own prefered units, it's hard to understand why this site tries to enforce such a funky perspective on bitcoin. I find it confusing and I hope they fix it.
Thanks, indeed, for the long post (I hadn't seen it before you pointed me to it).
