Author: Alan Reiner 2014-03-13 16:14:20
Published on: 2014-03-13T16:14:20+00:00
In an email exchange between Jeff Garzik and Mike Hearn in March 2014, the two discussed whether BitPay should use millibitcoins (mBTC) or microbitcoins (uBTC) as its default unit of measurement. Mike suggested that BitPay should use mBTC unless major wallets, exchanges, or price watching sites use uBTC by default. Jeff argued that 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. He added that mBTC is problematic because it produces annoyances for major accounting packages that are hard-limited to two decimal places. Another person who joined the discussion whole-heartedly agreed with Jeff, saying that using uBTC was the way to go to end user confusion and make things easier for software systems which are designed to handle money (i.e. two decimal places). They added that they've been working with Marty Zigman, who's creating a Bitcoin plugin for NetSuite accounting platform, and he was already forced to switch uBTC long ago for exactly the reasons described above. They believe the system will track up to 3 decimal places without causing all sorts of heartache and automatic rounding. If there's any way to revisit this, they would support it as they were just about to do another Armory release and could support this very easily.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T20:30:45.862029+00:00