[Bitcoin-development] moving the default display to mbtc

[Jeff Garzik]

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
> BitPay should use mBTC as well. Unless you can point to any major wallets,
> exchanges or price watching sites that use uBTC by default?
>
> I think it is highly optimistic to assume we'll need another 1000x shift any
> time soon. By now Bitcoin isn't obscure anymore. Lots of people have heard

Such hand-wavy, data-free logic is precisely why community
coordination is preferred to random apps making random decisions in
this manner.

mBTC is problematic because you do not need 1000x shift in value to
produce annoyances for major accounting packages that are hard-limited
to two decimal places.  Further, spreadsheets hide information if
formatting is configured naively -- that is, if formatting is
configured for bitcoin the way it is configured for other currencies.

Fundamentally, more than two decimal places tends to violate the
Principle Of Least Astonishment with many humans, and as a result,
popular software systems have been written with that assumption.

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