[Bitcoin-development] moving the default display to mbtc

[Allen Piscitello]

Mike is making an assumption that is not necessary, which is the price of
the most commonly used unit should be between is $.50 and $1000.  The issue
to revisit or not shouldn't require $1,000,000 Bitcoin price.  Typing a ton
of decimals is incredibly annoying.  Doing the mental math in my head is
annoying.  Even if a cup of coffee costs 3.12345 mBTC, that's a lot more
annoying than 3123.45 uBTC.

The points that people liked mBTC better than BTC doesn't mean anything
when comparing uBTC to mBTC.  Many people just stopped thinking at the mBTC
level, do not understand the implications involved in switching to uBTC, or
even considered uBTC.  The idea that we can just poll what people want to
give them the ideal experience is also flawed, in that users often don't
know what they want until they have it in front of them.

There is basically no downside to uBTC, except a few places already
switched to mBTC.  For exchanges, which are dealing with decimals since
they will do BTC/USD rather than the opposite, it might make sense for them
to continue to use mBTC or BTC.  For wallets and prices for users,
especially when there are large decimals since the price is still based on
more stable currencies, then converted to Bitcoin, let's switch to what is
easiest.

I haven't seen a single good argument for keeping it in mBTC (other than
some people already did it).  On the other hand, I've seen numerous great
reasons for switching to uBTC.

My two cents.


On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Melvin Carvalho
<melvincarvalho at gmail.com>wrote:

>
>
>
> On 13 March 2014 16:50, Mike Hearn <mike at plan99.net> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik at bitpay.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Such hand-wavy, data-free logic is precisely why community
>>> coordination is preferred to random apps making random decisions in
>>> this manner.
>>>
>>
>> That ship sailed months ago. If you wanted a big push for uBTC, then
>> would have been the time. Though given that it'd have made lots of normal
>> balances incredibly huge, perhaps it's a good thing that didn't happen.
>> Also "milli" is a unit people encounter in daily life whereas micro isn't.
>> Is it milli / micro / nano or milli / nano / micro? I bet a lot of people
>> would get that wrong.
>>
>> If you have to export to financial packages that can't handle fractional
>> pennies, then by all means represent prices in whatever units you like for
>> that purpose, but in software designed for ordinary people in everyday life
>> mBTC is a pretty good fit.
>>
>> Besides, fractional pennies crop up in existing currencies too (the
>> famous Verizon Math episode showed this), so if a financial package insists
>> on rounding to 2dp then I guess it may sometimes do the wrong thing in some
>> business cases already.
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>> Lots of people use currencies that don't have any fractional components
>> at all ! So perhaps all prices should be denominated in satoshis to ensure
>> that they're not surprised :)
>>
>> The (number) line has to be drawn somewhere. Wallets are free to suppress
>> more than 2dp of precision and actually Andreas' app lets you choose your
>> preferred precision. So I think in the end it won't matter a whole lot, if
>> the defaults end up being wrong people can change them until wallet authors
>> catch up.
>>
>
> +1 agree with Mike on everything
>
> A couple of points:
>
> 1. bitcoinity already switched to mbtc aka millitbits (
> https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MilliBit ) and it was positively recieved,
> they got quite a few donations
>
> 2. If you watch Gavin's talk at the CFR he suggests the community comes to
> a consensus through implementations rather than top down decision making
> (If I understood correctly)
>
> I think it's up to wallet maintainers whether to switch the default.
>
>
>
>>
>>
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