Topic: Quick, answer! Is BTC 0.000152 big or small? - page 2. (Read 4744 times)

This made me laugh.

Cents is from the latin centi, meaning one part in 100.  We just don't call them centidollars because after hundreds of years, the word has been worn down to a stub.

I agree with this. I do hope that we will use some other notation than mBTC and uBTC though. Putting a prefix in front of the currency code looks very akward to me. Would be much nicer to have a separate symbol for "millies" or whatever we choose to call them (like $ and ¢ for dollars and cents).

But actually, it might be easier to reach a consensus on the symbol for "millies" than it has been for Bitcoin. ฿, Ƀ or whatever it is.

You're right, it isn't a problem, it's more like a "nice to have" than a "must have". I can also see that this kind of change is not something that's easy to do. But I am still convinced that having prices and assets displayed in that range is good for Bitcoin adoption.

"The community" isn't going to do anything as instantly as that would require. Just use whatever name you like for 1/1000, eventually one or more will catch on and be the de facto base unit.

At Seals we use 'chips' to mean 1/1000.

This isn't a real problem because people can solve it easily when and where it matters.

Got sidetracked; that is not the main argument. The main argument is people seeing prices like 0.00231 or 0.00097 which is not right because they are not "transaction-friendly" (for a lack of a better word). They are not transaction friendly because the way we are used to deal with the power of 10 in our daily lives. This is the argument.

And it seems I'm not the only one thinking like this.


@markm
I don't know what you are talking about there ... A split can be as simple as community agreeing that the mBitcoin is THE BTC and display all transactions accordingly in the wallets, mining software, ecommerce sites, etc. Already mined bitcoin will just be displayed as x1000 (if we are to use the mBTC example). What has Mgox and speculators has to do with anything?

Not sure if you are saying the cost of having everyone hard fork every week is not a problem, we should hard fork often to keep up with fads in whether to use decimals at all or whether it is more fun to all be millionares or whatever?

Or that you agree a thousand times over thus it is very boring that the same obvious objection to an pathetically stupid Frequently Proposed Idiocy has to come up a thousand times due to Frequently Proposed Idiocies being so very frequently proposed...

-MarkM-

Yawn.  Liked this argument better the first thousand times I read it...

Okay, so maybe you are right, and hardforking the entire blockchain at a cost in technician and website-author and account and so on hours of only a few hundred bitcoins per merchant for small or maybe even middling sized merchants is a great idea and works really well to enhance popular acceptance.

The public rejoices, a hundred million bitcoins (our current bitcoins, called what, kilocoins or something by your plan?) are bought at Mt Gox that weekend and...

Oops, wait, there are not a hundred million bitcoins in existence! Price rises so the 1200 million bucks pouring into Gox can actually buy coins.

Speculators see bitcoins just jumped 10 to 100 times in price, they jump in with a couple billion dollars as soon as the banks open on monday.

Oops, who the heck is crazy enough to sell bitcoins when they will be worth 10 to 100 times as much tomorrow? Price jumps another three of four orders of magnitude.

Even the not so wildly speculative can hardly miss seeing the headlines. Half a trillion jumps in when the banks open tuesday. Holy cow your house is worth less than a bitcoin! Oh wait, even in your new hard forked way of doing decimals it is worth how many millibitcoins by friday?

Time to implement a weekly hard-fork until all six billion people on the planet have a few grand of that week's new denomination so they don't feel their life savings look pathetic as less than a whole whatthefucktheycallitthisweek?

Oh wait, seven billion people. Price rise again...

-MarkM-

Wow that is the argument.

Lets pretend dollars used, $, K$ ($1,000 USD), and M$ ($1,000,000).

You honestly think people will be confused when they see for example some new celebrity mansion is $M 3.2.  What?  That mansion is only 3 bucks.  Dude I am going to buy 100 of them.  Or they see a candybar marked $1.2.  "What a ripoff that candybar is more than a I make in a week".

Well, since we are talking about factors of 1000, I think that the proper SI prefix should be obvious in most cases.  As in, I'm sure you can tell the difference between the cost of a bottle of beer, a used car, and a luxury mansion without too much effort.

P.S.  Hundreds of threads on this topic, and this one doesn't seem to have added much, if anything, to the discussion.

Exactly, so there will be some confusion when some sites display prices in BTC and some in mBTC. You need to pay attention to see what small letter there is in front of the BTC, is it "m"? is it "u"? somebody said something about "n".

I still see no valid arguments for not doing or at least considering doing a split (except the technical one presented by d&t). For the sake of Bitcoin adoption I hope I'm wrong and you guys are right.

it be simple if compared to $:    1btc=1000satoshi=1000$ yeah 1btc=1000$ in 2016?

i earn 3btc a month=3000satoshi then i can buy a bread for 2satoshi or take my girl out for diner an pay 80satoshi

this is how i at the moment explane it to my noob friends, i know it isn,t the truth but they understand the point.

 

Enforce?  Who would have the power to enforce something like that?  The presumption is that vendors will mostly follow SI.

I have seen products advertised as 99 cents, strangely there wasn't mass confusion.   If mBTC becomes common place it won't confuse users either.   Especially if/when BTC is worth >$1,000 USD:BTC.  It will simply make more sense for user to subconsciously think of 1 mBTC = $1.20 or $1.38 or $0.92 the it will to think of 1 BTC = $1,200, $1,380 or $920. 

A 100:1 split would require a hard fork.  You can do it today but without 90%+ support for miners, merchants, users, developers it isn't going anywhere.  It simply isn't going to happen.  I think the public isn't as stupid as you make it them out to be.

Would YOU be confused if someone wanted to sell you a game for 1,800 mBTC?  I find it annoying when people are smart enough to understand something yet assume "those other people" are too stupid to get it.

Here's the difference: we are building a new currency called Bitcoin, not mBitcoin.

Will you enforce a way for merchants to display prices in bitcoins? mBTC? uBTC? Look at how the prices are displayed everywhere; do you see prices like: this item costs 723 pennies, or here, big offer on the new car, only 22543650 m$. There are reasons why the decimal point is used the way it's used and I've already touched upon some of them.

But why I can't set it to show cents? I mean, usually we use cents, not millies.

What is the difference between saying that will be 12,000 mBTC (where total # of mBTC is 21 billion) and saying that will be 12,000 BTC (where total # of BTC is 21 billion).

Right now things are priced in BTC because most items are full and fractional BTC (i.e. 200 BTC, 1.245 BTC).  If the value of BTC rose to a point where 1 BTC was worth say $832 most items would be priced in mBTC.

"How much for that new Steam game?"
"24 mBTC".

So your logic seems to come down to the fact that people could accept 24 BTC but can't accept 24 mBTC.  Do people also have a problem with the concept of pennies?   If someone tells you he has 500 pennies are you totally confused and say "dude how much is that in dollars, my brain is so primitive I can only handle one unit at a time".

People don't use mBTC right now because there really is no need to.  Most products and services are either in full or high fractional BTC.   If/when BTC rises to a point where that isn't the case it is trivial for websites and merchants to start displaying prices in mBTC instead. 

There is no need for a massively disruptive (and likely impossible to implement) protocol change.  Today you can start pricing things in mBTC if you feel it makes more sense.  If enough people agree mBTC will become the defacto method of pricing goods & services..   

Here is an example:
"If you admit your plan is stupid I will give you 50 mBTC.  Just send me a Bitcoin address".

Thank you.

Seems the other topics ended up into the same technical discussion that I was trying to move away from. It's hard to make all the engineers and programmers here understand the importance of UX and user-friendliness in anything you build as hardware or software. Here's the cold truth: if you want the average joe to embrace your solution, you need to make it easy for him to understand and use it.

Apple can be a good example, although they excel in both but still ... all my iPhone-users friends name user-friendliness (I see it as technological-challenged-people-friendliness) as the main reason they bought the phone and no matter how much I try to show them that some Android phones have actually better hardware, larger screen and even better software (HTC sense comes to mind) they won't budge. However I won't short AAPL stock any time soon because there are more of them out there than more of me.

Other threads about this:

From June 2011:
Shift the decimal point over? (with poll)
Solution: How to shift the decimal

From September 2012:
Move the decimal place! (Is it possible?)

The solution is not a setting for the value is displayed in the client. It's should be a "setting" for how the coins value is displayed/perceived in Bitcoin transactions.