However, given that bitcoin transactions can indeed be measured in bits (although kilobytes would be more typical way to express it), there is a real confusion.
Really? Lets put aside the argument if you do or do not like "bits" as a unit. You honestly would be confused. You can't determine the meaning of the word from the context even though you do it for thousands of other words every single day.
My internet connection is blazing fast, it is 50 Megabits per second. Would you honestly believe he was saying his internet connection generating 50 million bits of currency a second? Really?
The tickets are 5,000 bits. Would you honestly be trying to figure out how they compressed the concert tickets to be less than 1KB? Really?
Ok, I think you're trying to get me to address whether or not I would be confused. And I think you're right to put it into context. If you say "my internet connection is fast, 50megabits per second" then there's very little chance for confusion because you primed me with the adjective "fast". However, in your second example, you use the semantically bleached "are" which is interpretable in many different ways, so I like this example. Now imagine these are etickets, you say "tickets are 4096 bits". Are you talking about the price of the tickets in bitcoins or are you talking about the size of the tickets as a network packet? Presumably, in whatever context our conversation occurs, we can disambiguate this. However, I think it's clumsy to use a unit of size on a network to indicate an arbitrarily placed decimal amount of a currency that's basically transmitted in packets over a network. I really do think this is a lot like saying, I have a new name for price of 3 bottles of soda water, we're going to call it a "litre". So, yes you can now buy 6 litres for 1 litre.
So, looking at the OP, we are really being asked to stop using metric prefixes on BTC rather than simply sticking to BTC and satoshi. This idea of "bits" must have another thread elsewhere I guess. I agree with sed that the "bits" thing seems weird.
Personally, I have no problem with the metrix prefixes and I have my own bias because I played a lot of dragons tale casino. In that game, mBTC is commonly used and below mBTC we usually see kSAT. So, we go from millibtc to kilosatoshis, then, obviously, just plain satoshis. My own opinion is that if you were going to pick out a special decimal place to name, it should probably be somewhere around 0.00001, something between mBTC and uBTC because that's on the order of magnitude to the value of a USD penny. Well that's my opinion anyway. Naming it something other than kSAT seems unmotivated to me, and naming it something like "bits" or "meters" seems outlandish.
