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?
I think Ryan's busy with bigger things. He's working on "Vault" which will be some kind of general purpose wallet/bankroll/gamble-server/investment thing. He seems to have a habit of going depth-first and expanding the spec of the project until it's too big to complete.
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).
Yes, they do. But it's hardly intuitive. You shouldn't need to know anything about Greek letters for the monetary units you use to make sense. I'm sure the majority of people wouldn't be able to tell you what the u in uBTC meant.
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.
That's weak. It's the size in bytes that matters. Or thousands of bytes. But again, most people won't even know about that. Their wallet will tell them how big the fee needs to be and they'll click 'OK'. Or it won't even ask them and will just include the fee silently. What you need to remember is that most people aren't like you and I. They don't care about the details, and are positively turned off by them.
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).
Satoshis is probably a decent choice for unit size too, except it's so tiny and indivisible. I like bits (or uBTC) because they are divisible into 100 pieces, like like a dollar is. That's what people are used to their money being like.
Currently we have around 3000 bits to the dollar. That's a reasonable number to get your head around I think. Contrast that to 300000 satoshis to the dollar. The extra two digits make it hard to read - you have to count the digits to get an idea of how big the number is, whereas 3000 you can just glance at.
I doubt you'll ever change your mind about it - I just wanted to try to help you understand what people like about 'bits'...
