Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-03-13 17:18:51
Published on: 2014-03-13T17:18:51+00:00
The use of milli- and micro- notation for currency units is not well supported. It was suggested to use 1 XBT == 1 uBTC, which would be completely within the realm of supported behavior in accounting applications. However, this ship may have already sailed. The issue will be revisited in the future, but it's just a question of when, not if.People and software handle big numbers for small values in various nations (e.g. Yen) well, but they do not handle extra decimal places well. To roll out QuickBooks support without converting any numbers, mBTC is simply insufficient today, not in the future. Jeff Garzik argues that mBTC is also a security risk since decimal point conversion must be performed to support accounting packages limited to two decimal places. This produces a situation where your accounting system shows numbers that do not visually match the numbers in the bitcoin software, making auditing more difficult, particularly for outsiders. Shipping with mBTC defaults was unwise because it fails to solve existing, known problems that uBTC can solve, and considering the inevitable mBTC->uBTC switch.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T20:36:35.372534+00:00