Author: Allen Piscitello 2014-03-13 16:55:58
Published on: 2014-03-13T16:55:58+00:00
Mike Hearn is making an assumption that the most commonly used unit's price should be between $.50 and $1000, which is not necessary. He thinks that revisiting the issue shouldn't require a $1,000,000 Bitcoin price. Typing a ton of decimals or doing mental math is annoying. Even if a cup of coffee costs 3.12345 mBTC, it's still more annoying than 3123.45 uBTC. People liking mBTC better than BTC doesn't mean anything when comparing uBTC to mBTC. Many people don't 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 flawed as 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. Thus, 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.There is no good argument for keeping it in mBTC other than some people already did it. On the other hand, there are numerous great reasons for switching to uBTC. 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. Wallets are free to suppress more than 2dp of precision and actually Andreas' app lets you choose your preferred precision. So 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. Bitcoinity already switched to millibits (mBTC), and it was positively received, and they got quite a few donations. 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. It is up to wallet maintainers whether to switch the default.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T20:23:35.506824+00:00