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hello,
whenever i handle bitcoins it just doesent feel right. when i see my balance it just doesent feel right. 0,53434734 on my phone and now 10,9999995 on my secured wallet. 10,999995 because i didnt know the transaction fee was taken after the amount you send (but it makes sense so thats all well and good) but now i have an ugly number there as well. what i really wanted was to have precicley 11. Anyway, i was wondering if it was possible to change the denominations to make them more user friendly, if not look better or have a better feel.
it seems there is a maximum of 2,099,999,997,690,000 (just over 2 quadrillion) atomic units of bitcoin. The way we represent the smallest unit today is with 0.00000001. and i think thats a little awkward. Why not have the smallest unit be 1, and then the larger units be several of those. For sake of simplicity im gonna call the smallest unit bitcoin. So 1 BTC would be 100,000,000 bitcoin. Please correct me if wrong, but in this case what i had in my wallet would be the equivalent of 1,099,999,500 bitcoin. That is basically as simple a represenation we can get. But having a balance of 1,099,999,500 seems just as crazy as having a balance of 10,999995, although it has a better feel. However it becomes a nightmare trying to price anything in bitcoin if it there werent simpler denominations. Imagine coffée costing 100.000 bitcoin. Anyway the early developers of computers etc. had a similar problem. As the size of their files increased so did the length of numbers to display the size so they invented kilobyte, megabyte, gigabyte and so on. And i think bitcoin can draw some inspiration from that:)
But first, even tho bitcoin is a competitor to fiat. I mean, most bitcoiners dont really like fiat, but we can still learn from it. Most modern fiat currencies are built up in hundreds. Or their denominations are in hundreds. For example 100 cent to a dollar, 100 pennies to a pound, 100 cent to a euro. This is pretty neat, because it makes it easy to understand and compare a price while still giving sufficient scalability for the seller etc.
Moving on. So i think bitcoin should try to imitate this. Bitcoin denominations should be by the 100's, but since the numbers are so big atm. 1 denomination is not enough. So back to the programmers and the file size problem... Lets call the smallest amount of bitcoin, bitcoin. Then when you 100 of those, you would have a kilobitcoin. (i know in the file size world you would need ~1000, but thats too much for a currency, imagine if you bought something and it cost 1 dollar and 993 cent...) 1 bitcoin is 1 bitcoin, 100 bitcoin is 100 bitcoin OR 1kilobitcoin. 100 kilobitcoin would be 1 megabitcoin, 100 megabitcoin would be 1 gigabitcoin so on so forth. I dont know what you think about this? Im pretty sure it would be possible, for all that is required is to change the way software displays the amounts to the end user while still adhering to the "proper" methods underneath (the 0,00000343 one etc.).