Satoshi recognized that 21 million currency units are not enough for a global currency. His solution was to support eight decimal places on amounts, which also allows the reward halving process to continue for about 140 years. Internally the Bitcoin software recognizes 2,100 million million currency units (now known as satoshis) but they are divided by 100 million before presentation to users. So the block reward is currently 2,500 million satoshis or 25 bitcoins. Bitcoin units were fine for the first few years, but during the last 12 months the question keeps arising "Is another unit best for common usage?"
Inertia of existing systems
All modern fiat currencies have a major currency unit which has 100 minor units: e.g. $1 = 100 cents.
Everyone is used to this system from childhood. Many people are not comfortable with scientific notation or with small decimals such as 0.001234 which will be seen more and more often as the unit value of 1 bitcoin rises. Most people are happier dealing with 100,000 than 0.00001
Further, 99.99% of the world's financial and accounting systems do not support more than 2 decimal places on currencies, let alone as many as eight. It is arguable that Bitcoin has a very real handicap upon its growth by disregarding modern conventions in currencies.
Enter the "bit"
1 bitcoin = 1,000,000 bits
1 bit = 100 satoshis
User 101111 on reddit recommended this mock-up wallet. The current Bitcoin Core wallet does allow the selection of millibitcoins and microbitcoins but not with such a user friendly presentation, and not by default.
Is it time to consider using "bits" as standard? All balances become 1 million times larger, the block reward as 25 million bits, the exchange rate as 0.04 cents to a bit, a cup of coffee as 7000 bits instead of 0.007 BTC
Is this an improvement? If the bitcoin value increases into the thousands of dollars which unit is easiest to use for pricing goods and services?
