Author: Wladimir 2013-11-15 07:18:52
Published on: 2013-11-15T07:18:52+00:00
In a discussion about Bitcoin units on the Bitcoin-development mailing list in November 2013, Mark Friedenbach suggested skipping millibitcoin (mBTC) and moving straight to microbitcoin (uBTC), as having eight or even five decimal places is not intuitive for the average user. He argued that two decimal places are becoming standard for new national currencies, and that switching to uBTC wouldn't put Bitcoin too far from human scale everyday numbers. Alan Reiner expressed concern about changing the base unit in an established system, saying that there is no easy way to do it without causing more heartache than it's worth. Jeff Garzik suggested going straight to uBTC, saying that humans and existing computer systems handle numbers to the left of the decimals just fine and that using larger units would give intimidating large numbers at the current price level. He also proposed stealthily collecting people's settings and switching over once a majority had switched or adding a popup when upgrading the first time to explain where users could reconsider their unit settings. The community was encouraged to take initiative before switching over the default in the reference client, and it was noted that it had been possible for a long time to set the reference client to different units.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T20:15:34.447895+00:00