Re: [Bitcoin-development] "bits": Unit of account

[Christophe Biocca <christophe.biocca@gmail.com>]

If you absolutely want a name for some small unit (which may be
valuable, not knocking that part of the idea), please use anything
other than "bits", which is already a massively overloaded term that
will confuse the hell out of people:

Harddrive costs measured in "bits per gigabyte"?
An itunes movie download that costs 200,000 bits and takes 804.2
megabytes of space?
Or a 10-megabit internet connection costing 10,000,000 bits per month?

It's especially bad given that bitcoin will likely be adopted first
for online use, where the competing (and more recognized) meaning of
"bit" is most prevalent.

Not to mention the overlap within bitcoin itself, with people already
using "millibits" in conversation as a shorthand for mBTC. Hence one
new "bit" is exactly 1/1000 of the old "millibit".

Make something up if you have to, or just use satoshis.

On Sun, Apr 20, 2014 at 10:28 AM, Tamas Blummer <tamas@bitsofproof.com> wrote:
> People on this list are mostly engineers who have no problem dealing with
> magnitudes and have rather limited empathy for people who have a problem
> with them.
> They also tend to think, that because they invented money 2.0 they would not
> need to care of finance’s or people’s current customs.
>
> The importance of their decisions in these questions will fade as people
> already use wallets other than the core.
>
> Bring this particular discussion elsewhere, to the wallet developer.
>
> BTW the topic was discussed here several times, you have my support and Jeff
> Garzik’s.
>
> Regards,
>
> Tamas Blummer
> http://bitsofproof.com
>
> On 20.04.2014, at 15:15, Rob Golding <rob.golding@astutium.com> wrote:
>
> The average person is not going to be confident that the prefix they
> are using is the correct one,
>
>
> The use of any 'prefix' is one of choice and entirely unnecessary, and there
> are already established 'divisions' in u/mBTC for those that feel they need
> to use such things.
>
> people WILL send 1000x more or less than
> intended if we go down this road,
>
>
> Exceptionally unlikely - I deal every day with currencies with 0, 2 and 3
> dp's in amount ranging from 'under 1 whole unit' to tens of thousands - Not
> once in 20 years has anyone ever 'sent' more or less than intended - oh,
> they've 'intended' to underpay just fine, but never *unintended*.
>
> I propose that users are offered a preference to denominate the
> Bitcoin currency in a unit called a bit. Where one bitcoin (BTC)
> equals one million bits (bits) and one bit equals 100 satoshis.
>
>
> I propose that for people unable to understand what a bitcoin is, they can
> just use satoshi's and drop this entire proposal.
>
> Rob
>
>
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