Actually, I am in favor of a very radical change, which'd be the redefinition of a bitcoin, which I'd suggest should be one hundred satoshis. This gets around the issue of everyone talking "bitcoins" when they're dealing with maybe .003BTC for small transactions. From all the many discussions on this, the biggest take-away I get is that people are going to be talking in bitcoins no matter what, so there needs to be a very strong, unified push for "bitcoin" as being something orders of magnitude smaller for all these definition schemes to work -- we can't just make up definitions for "sub-bitcoins," I think - but need to completely redefine what a bitcoin is.
Assuming that, we can use a completely different symbol for "change" (I'm thinking like US/CAN dollar systems here, where we generally pay, say, $1.24 or $1095.95), and we'd literally just call it "bitcents." This way, we really only need two currency definitions, similar to many currencies, where it's the equivalent of dollars and cents -- very manageable. -But we can really use any symbol for the cents... we don't want it to look like the bitcoin symbol... If we go with satoshis as the "change," we can use a modified "s," and still following the dollar-type schemes, it'd just be an "s" with a diagonal or straight vertical through-strike (ideally, not in a way which makes it look like an "8," heh). There's an issue with the radix point, here, though, and that's really an even bigger problem, beyond Bitcoin, we're seeing with economic globalization and which exists on this forum, where "$1,950" is "$1.95" to someone else.
In reality, I don't think any proposal will be pushed with enough unity and force to work, and we'll end up with a very fractured set of words and icons used, where we talk bitcoins and then ("thousands-place type")satoshis, so like kilosatoshis and the like. Frankly, I don't think we can all come around to adopt something new and beneficial -- it'll probably just be something confusing we'll have to live with until we die, and it'll just be more and more difficult to change as more people start using it.
I totally agree with this thinking. I think we should redefine a single bitcoin as 100,000 Satoshis. That would put its current value at around $0.60 cents. If and when 100,000 Satoshis become worth $10 or $100, a bitcoin could again be redefined as 1,000 Satoshis. This community would only have to make that difficult change once. By the time we are 1-2 orders of magnitude more valuable, we will have governments and professional marketing firms helping to decide what nomenclature to use so as to not disrupt the economy.
The concept of a Bitcoin has tremendous brand awareness and reputation behind it. By having that 'unit' be so valuable as it is now ($600), it becomes basically unusable. And we scare people off when they think it is too 'expensive'. If we redefined what a bitcoin was, it would make education that much easier.