Re: [Bitcoin-development] moving the default display to mbtc

[Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com>]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 12:14 PM, Alan Reiner <etotheipi@gmail.com> wrote:
> Of course, as Mike said, this ship may have already sailed, but if
> there's any way to revisit this, I'm there.  We're just about to do
> another Armory release and could support this very easily.

mBTC now just means the issue -will- be revisited in the future.  Just
a question of when, not if.

People and software in various nations handle big numbers for small
values (e.g. Yen) just fine.
People and software do -not- handle extra decimal places well, field
experience shows.

<vendor hat: on>  To roll out QuickBooks support --without converting
any numbers, a key financial attribute-- mBTC is simply insufficient
today, not in the future.

I also argue that it is a security risk, as follows:  To support
accounting packages limited to 2 decimal places, decimal point
conversion must be performed.  This produces a situation where your
accounting system shows numbers that do not visually match the numbers
in the bitcoin software.  That, in turn, making auditing more
difficult, particularly for outsiders.

Shipping with mBTC defaults was decidedly unwise, considering that --
like BTC -- it fails to solve existing, known problems that uBTC can
solve, and considering the inevitable mBTC->uBTC switch.

-- 
Jeff Garzik
Bitcoin core developer and open source evangelist
BitPay, Inc.      https://bitpay.com/