Author: Mark Friedenbach 2014-03-14 16:01:33
Published on: 2014-03-14T16:01:33+00:00
The concept of everyday prices being low and in single digits is not just Western-centric but English-centric as well. In Europe, an espresso in Rome would have cost a few (tens of?) thousand lira in recent memory. It was the pegging of the Euro to the U.S. dollar that brought European states in line with the English-speaking world who themselves trace lineage to the pound sterling. There are no culturally-neutral common standards for currency and pricing. Accounting software packages do not handle more than two decimal places well, which gives technical justifications for moving to either uBTC or accounting in Satoshis directly. There is an argument for using uBTC because it retains alignment with the existing kBTC/BTC/mBTC/uBTC conventions. However, another limitation of these accounting software practices is that they do not always handle SI notation very well, particularly sub-unit prefixes. By relabeling uBTC to be a new three-digit symbol, we can be fully compliant with any software accounting package out there. The changes could be made now simply by a few big players and/or the Bitcoin Foundation changing their practice and their users following suit. Andreas Schildbach wrote on 03/14/2014 at 07:49 AM about the cost of an Espresso in local currency, where he said that mBTC 3.56 is close to what people expect for the Euro and the Dollar. On the other hand, Tamas Blummer argued that Bitcoin would have a better chance to be perceived as a currency of its own if it had prices and fractions like currencies do. He suggested that 3558 bits would be more accepted than 3.558 mBTC or 0.003578 BTC. However, nobody complained about confusion because of the mBTC switch, and the amount in local currency mattered more to the users. Jeff Garzik resurrected the topic and said that Bitcoin Wallet moved to mBTC several weeks ago, which was disappointing because it sounded like the consensus was uBTC and moving to uBTC later may result in additional user confusion. The standard has become mBTC, and that is what was adopted. There are locale-sensitive presentation issues, and multibit HD offers a simple configuration panel giving pretty much every possible combination for customizing needs beyond the offered default.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T20:39:24.514313+00:00