Topic: RFC: SI- type of naming convention for BTC (Read 5596 times)

For those interested in the discussion, this vote might be interesting as follow up http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=13144.0

I agree. The Average Joe is pretty stupid and we want mainstream acceptance. There's no currency in the world that has the purchasing power of the bitcoin as far as I know- people simply aren't used to a single unit of a currency being worth $7-10 and the value could cause people to reject it as being "too much" or "overvalued". Also you're probably greatly overestimating the math skills of the general public and people's ability to understand decimals, it's sad but true. If you want bitcoin to be universally used and accepted, everyone, including those below average, needs to be able to grasp its value.  I don't think this is extremely pressing at the moment, but if it gets to the point that a single bitcoin becomes such a valuable unit that 95% of all commercial transactions involve sums of less than a bitcoin, a switch of naming should be considered.

Well, please reread the RFC, it is about avoiding naming endless fractions but instead change the commonly used name for unit x in the unchanged numerical system.

Today, technology review posted a very good article on Bitcoins titled "What Bitcoin Is, and Why It Matters" yet they again we see the 21m issue:

No matter how much coders and technocrats argue that the bitcoin is divisible, which was never questioned, the issue will not go away. "Average Joe" users dont like and dont want something that is divisible 1m times. they want 100 or max 1k, like tehy are used to.

Link to the article: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/37619/?a=f

At least the original client intentionally forces a proper decimal point regardless of locale settings. I agree that removing the ambiguity is a good thing.

I think you're naming in the wrong direction.  Should the rate of acceptance or exchange grow from here to respectible levels (10,000 dollars per coin or 30% of the world population using BTC), you don't need to worry about what you'll call 1 million BTC.  It will simply be 1 million BTC.  We don't say megadollars.

You'd need to figure out how to name 0.001BTC all the way down to 0.000001BTC.

Actually in many parts of the world it is the opposite. I think we all understand each other here, hm? 0,03 cannot be 0 thousand and thirty, right?

That's a BAD thing. If 0.03 BTC discourages CPU mining, great! It should be discourage.

P.S. note that commas are for deliminating thousands, not a decimal point

Can't this be solved by just changing the default display units in the client for example, to mBTC (or later uBTC)? Then instead of 0.010 BTC you have 10 mBTC or 10000 uBTC. Looks much bigger.

The public will be fine with "millibitcoins" as an accepted unit, regardless of the fact that one bitcoin=1BTC. Providing we follow SI the other way, without moving anything, it'll be fine. Compare the relative size of the litre to the gram: it just doesn't matter so long as we are consistent.

Yes, i know what you mean. Its not about any technical issue but bitcoin having aspects that make it unecessarily complex for "users". Hence the suggestion, without changing anything except what clients write next to the actual balance, to make it more user friendly.
I assume that regarding the major public, you can safely assume two things:
a) they want a currency that scales up like every other currency, virtual or not, out there. people rather have a HUGEPILEOFSOMETHING than a 0.002 of something, even if it is the same number under the hood of the software and in valueation
b) never underestimate the psychology of money and markets. by saying 21 million bitcoins are the max, which is true with the current logic, people implicitly percieve bitcoin as a very short lived system. people have to do research and actually take time to grasp the concept of fractions of btc to actually get rid of that "first reaction". if you make people think that there are 21 trillion or quatrillion or wherever u set the btc unit in the system, the immediate first reaction is "aint no limit i will ever get to in that system, sounds good", which is infinitely better than assuming "shit, only 21 million, who came up with that, bill gates can buy all of that lol roflcopter".

Yes, my suggestion caters to the coding unsawvy and mathematically not so talented. which is 95%+ of the internet. If bitcoin wants to be widespread it has to change the "parts interfereing with endusers" to a system that makes them feel fuzzy, at home and rich. Giving that CPU miner 0,03 BTC sounds so awful to him, giving him 0,03 MEGA of something makes him feel "well its mega, so 0,03 is a nice piece of the pie".

It wouldn't hurt for Bitcoiners to stop saying this, and to start saying "No more than 21,000,000.00000000000" will ever exist.

I would actually quite like us to come up with a name for the smallest possible unit, because it makes API design simpler. In BitCoinJ I called the smallest unit possible "nanocoins" and was (rightly) called on it, because that's not the right prefix to use (it makes sense to design APIs in terms of integers rather than floats).

I honestly can't say I like satoshis as the smallest unit either, but at this point I'll take anything. The alternative is just referring to money denominated in integer units as "value" which is a bit of a cop-out.

Sorry, wasn't trying to derail.

I still just don't see that the problem, to the extent that I see a problem at all, is something that can be solved in this way.  If you are teaching a child math, and they don't understand how to divide 3 by 7, you don't tell him that 3 is really 3,000,000 frobnitzs.  Instead you show him how to use the tools that already exist (fractions and decimals).

Please dont mix this discussion about protocol etc with the initial topic at hand as its not related to it and can very easily create confusion since at first glance it sounds related to my proposal.

Considering that we will have several decades of warning of the impending need to switch precisions, I still think it will be trivial to upgrade the entire network.

Changing the generation scheme to give more than 21 million coins would also be technically trivial, but the social effects would destroy the whole system.

Actually, the fact is that it is basically impossible to add any more precision. It's possibly if the whole network upgrades, but that's basically creating a new network. It's just as "trivial" as changing the 21 million total into something else.

Holy crap, that passes for content these days?  Ugh, I'm glad I've never read that site before, and I think I'll continue never reading it.

Please note that your proposal does nothing to solve the real problem here:  shitty 'journalism'.

Do you read techblogs like techcrunch who have millions of readers? I quote from http://techcrunch.com/2011/05/21/the-bitcoin-experiment/


While not stating directly bitcoins are atomic, it heavily implies it to the reader.

This is actually a problem. If you watch 'bitcoin' on twitter you'll see a lot of "What, only 21 million ever? That's not enough to go around at all! Herp derp." Of course, the intelligence or attention level of most of the troglodytes on Twitter is so low in the first place (with respect to bitcoin) that they may not matter.

Unfortunately I think the existing naming system is probably too entrenched for this to be a doable thing now. Already people are using mBTC, cBTC, uBTC, etc to shift the decimal place, and I don't know that that is bad.

After all, for most household and benchtop uses, who measures things in meters? I remember in science class in school meters were almost never used. I am much more familiar with how large is a millimeter or a centimeter than a meter. My estimation of a meter is "approximately 3 feet" from my USian upbringing.

The point is, people use cm and mm without batting an eye. I understand your hesitancy given that "less than one" feels like too little. However, I don't know that the overhead to change this in people's minds is low enough vs. the expected benefit of changing the units. I am still open to persuasion if you can find some surefire way to communicate this.

Also the unit of satoshi is nice, but I think it just muddies the waters, especially given that there probably is no satoshi anyway.