Topic: 1,000,000 bits = 1 bitcoin. Future-proofing Bitcoin for common usage? VOTE - page 19. (Read 57137 times)

Crosspost from Coindesk:

I totally disagree to change it to "bits"!
Most people I know, that aren't so involved with "that Internet and computerstuff" AKA the masses and majority of older businessowners that don't deal with IT.
They are glad, they can finally use a Smartphone, send an E-Mail, they know their SDcard or HDD "has a lot of Gigabyte" if you ask them for the Processor...
There are too many "bits & bytes" already in the daily life and the only thing happening with this change is: even more confusion!
If we don't avoid this, we are making Bitcoins even more complicated to understand for everyone else.

Most of them just recently learned, that a digital photo consumes 3 Megabyte of Diskspace
and are still highly confused about the difference to their ISP's provider (Megabits) Bandwidth and all that stuff.
If you link Bitcoin to "bits", the first thing to happen is like "oh, so i could store millions /160gigabits on my Flashmemory?"
or "Oh, but i have slow 1mbit Internetconnection ; only low datavolume to spend per month...can i transfer so much of them with it? doesn't sound fast/safe/cheap."

There has to be a simpler way: Euro/Dollar + Cents / Bitcoin + MSat (Megasatoshis) !?
I don't know...there are already enough suggestions and options to do so.
But for the sake of sooner mass adoption, please - do not use "bits" as a Bitcoin unit. Name it more unique.

my 2 satoshis

bits are easier to use because it is a word rather than a group of letters

  Not good idea.

this. I would like to add that uBTC is also confusing, though, whereas bits are not.

Spell it how you like (mic maybe?), but engineers often refer to micro... (verbally) as 'mikes'

Who TF is "Mike" ?

Mike is perfectly fine with me too.
And the whole idea of using 2 decimals after it comes quite naturally.
'Bit' is just confusing.

I'd throw in consideration for the "back" to honor Adam Back, creator of the hashcash algorithm used as bitcoin's proof of work.  He has a direct contribution to bitcoin, and a pioneering and integral one at that.  Short of Satoshi him/her/themself, I can't think of anyone whose work is more explicitly embodied in the bitcoin software.  Honestly, we really owe Adam an enormous debt of gratitude for his contribution.  This would be a fitting honor to place his name alongside Satoshi's.

Plus Adam's name is short and sweet, like "bit", without having the prior confusion of other uses of bit.  (how is a millibit equal to 1000 bits, anyway?)

Finally, back sounds like money.  It's similar to "buck" and rolls off the tongue just as easily.  Not only that, there's no accent or dialect which commingles the "uh" of buck and "aa" of back, so they can't be confused.  It would be like confusing the words "faq" and "fuck".  To boot, It also has the additional connotation of "greenback", another good money association.

Think about it.  Doesn't "ten thousand backs" have a visceral ring to it?  It sounds like money.  Isn't that one of the most important qualities we could impart to our choice of word?  Bitcoin sounds like money because coins are money.  Bit by itself loses that advantage while back doesn't.  "256 bits" sounds like computer gobbledy-gook to the layperson, but while they may not immediately know what 256 backs are, it sure sounds like it's money.

I'd also submit that the symbol for it should be lower case thorn: http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/extended-ascii-code/lowercase-letter-thorn-ascii-code-231.html: "þ".  Thorn has two major advantages:

a) it's plain ascii.  Any computer system or programming language (I'm looking at you, financial institutions) can use it.  It doesn't require unicode support.  If we want 100% market penetration, we can't underestimate how many old, non-unicode systems there are out there which will never be upgraded to support it.  Unicode support is frickin hard.

b) more importantly, it will not drive web developers insane having to remember an arbitrary alt-code.  Thorn already has an html entity, "þ". Anyone can remember and type that, and you don't have to hold and release a modifier key for a multi-digit code to do it.

Seriously folks, this naming process is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.  This term could be used for decades, even centuries to come.  Do we really have to shoot our load after a few minutes of consideration or can we take the time to really come up with an acceptable idea?

Love the bit idea.
Mining is so hard these days - it would make me feel like I'm mining more.
It would also help the price of Bitcoin rise.

Going over to bits doesn't mean we abandon the metric system. Instead, we could say "kilobits" (=mBTC) and "megabits" (=BTC). I agree about switching to bits, but I really think it should be called something else to avoid confusion (could, for example, be used for people scamming less educated people since 1 bitcoin and 1 bit sounds very similar). I have seen many other suggestions, and all of them are better than bits imo.

Looking at it through my "database dude" lens, it has always disturbed/hassled me that 100 million satoshis is 1 BTC.

Explanation:

Most Currency is stored to 4 digit precision in a database. i.e: 0.0001

Therefore: 1 "dollar" is 10,000 satoshis
Therefore: 1 "cent" is 100 satoshis.

This is critical for allowing systems to maintain compatibility across multiple currencies.

In the 2 systems I have added support to, the decision has been made to always pass satoshis in and out of the database via view restriction.

i.e:
Create view BitcoinMoneyOut
as
Select Currency * 10000 as Satoshis
from Table

Create view BitcoinMoneyIn
as
Select Currency / 10000 as Satoshis
from Table

Just thought I would add food for thought in the nomenclature battle.

satoshi is a meaning collision and for a good reason. to honour the creator. so it is relevant

zib seems to alien or foreign... i prefer:
1gav - to honour Gavin Andressens years of coding bitcoin protocol
1alp - to honour the first LEGITIMATE business using bitcoin (alpaca socks)
1silk - i dont like this, but atleast it has some relevance, as the notorious site silkroad, that gave bitcoin fame ("any publicity is good publicity")

'zib' seems a bit weird because it's new; any made-up word faces that at first.

But made-up words also come with no meaning-collisions – they can mean precisely what is chosen – and become familiar after a few exposures.

'bit' is always going to create comprehension/abbreviation/search problems, as people try to move between the different senses. (And since the bit-as-binary-digit is the core of the Bitcoin system – the binary math that gives the currency its scarcity and security – everyone who ever tries to become a Bitcoin expert will face these clashing terms.)

yup

Just as seriously, 1 mike = 100 satoshis is perfectly fine.  It predates this "bit" idea by a number of years, meshes much better with the more established mBTC and uBTC convention, and has less of a name overloading problem.

The whole point of the idea of renaming to "bit" is predicated on "mike" not being good enough; not "FUTURE PROOFING.." as franky1 put it.  Consequently, you'll have to provide more of an argument to adequately counter searcy's proposals: "byt", "biit", and "bbit".

Anything not based on the metric system will fail.  The entire world (except the US) is on the metric system.

"centi" (c) is 1/100 or cBTC
"milli" (m) is 1/1000 or mBTC

0.01 btc is one centibit.  Easy!

point is to have a name for a unit where we have maximal 2 decimal digits. this is neccessary for a lot of software which are in use already.

1.00 --> 1 bit = 100 sats and that is it. Bitcoin is the protocol and one bit is the base unit which you can divide in 100 satoshis.

EDIT: one neccessary thing would be on the other hand the possibility to transfer at least 1 bit with one transaction which would have impact on the blocksize. transfer roughly at least 0.0005$ with one tx. this should be possible. if I be a Newbie I will test the whole thing: go to a Bitcoin faucet where I will get one bit and then I will try to transfer it to a friend on the mars.   off chain txs are insecure. proof is inputs.io. too centralized.

fixed that for ya

I think that would take the confusing part of "bit" a bit too far

What about this:

1 Bitcoin = 1 GigaBit

e-0 GigaBit
e-1
e-2
e-3 MegaBit
e-4
e-5
e-6 KiloBit
e-7
e-8 Satoshi
e-9 Bit (not currently dividable but maybe in the future)

People are much more used to the large prefixes than to the small ones.