Author: Marcel Jamin 2017-12-14 08:02:44
Published on: 2017-12-14T08:02:44+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev email thread, David A. Harding argues that "microbitcoins" would be a better denomination than "bits." He claims that "microbitcoins" is not a homonym for any other word in English or other languages, whereas "bit" and "bits" have many homonyms, some of which are quite common in general currency usage. Reposting /u/BashCo's post on Reddit, Harding states that homonyms are fine because our brains are able to interpret language based on context. Also, "bits" was used in reference to money long before "bits and bytes" came along, and even before the metric system itself. Harding states that "bits" has two decimal places, matching the format of dozens of other major currencies, which makes it superior to millibitcoins. No other currency has eight decimal places, or even four decimal places, he says. Most of them have two, like dollars and cents, bits and satoshis. He adds that if people actually want this transition to happen, they need to train their own brains by switching their wallets and exchange settings to bits. The shift will probably happen eventually, although the major Bitcoin denomination probably isn't going anywhere any time soon, even if the majority of people use "bits" as a matter of habit. Currently, 99.99 bits equals $1.63 USD.Harding also argues that "microbitcoins" trains users to understand SI prefixes, allowing them to easily migrate from one prefix to the next. This will be important when bitcoin prices rise to $10M USD, and the bits denomination has the same problems the millibitcoin denomination has now but it's also useful in the short term when interacting with users who make very large payments (bitcoin-scale) or very small payments (nanobitcoin-scale). Although Bitcoin does not currently support committed nanobitcoin-scale payments in the block chain, it can be supported in a variety of ways by offchain systems, including (it is hypothesized) trustless systems based on probabilistic payments.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T23:05:25.344386+00:00