[Bitcoin-development] moving the default display to mbtc

[Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1574 bytes --]

Rationale
=======

Given the recent rise in value there seems to be anecdotal evidence that 1
bitcoin being so high is putting off a lot of normal buyers, because they
feel that putting down $400+ and only getting "1 coin", or having to buy in
multiples of 1 whole coin, is too much.. only after it being explained that
they can buy fractional amounts to they regain interest, apparently
happening increasingly.


Straw Poll
========

6 months ago there was a straw poll on this

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=220322.0

Roughly 2/3 of respondents favoured switching

A further 20% said to switch after it hits 1000

Satoshi's comments:
================

Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the
world if it really gets huge.

But don't worry, there are another 6 decimal places that aren't shown, for
a total of 8 decimal places internally.  It shows 1.00 but internally it's
1.00000000.  If there's massive deflation in the future, the software could
show more decimal places.

If it gets tiresome working with small numbers, we could change where the
display shows the decimal point.  Same amount of money, just different
convention for where the ","'s and "."'s go.  e.g. moving the decimal place
3 places would mean if you had 1.00000 before, now it shows it as 1,000.00.

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44.msg267#msg267


Would now be a good time to start thinking about changing the default
display in the software.  Perhaps initially it could be a dropdown display
option, then at some point mbtc becomes the default?

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 2005 bytes --]