Mike is making an assumption that is not necessary, which is the price of the most commonly used unit should be between is $.50 and $1000.  The issue to revisit or not shouldn't require $1,000,000 Bitcoin price.  Typing a ton of decimals is incredibly annoying.  Doing the mental math in my head is annoying.  Even if a cup of coffee costs 3.12345 mBTC, that's a lot more annoying than 3123.45 uBTC.

The points that people liked mBTC better than BTC doesn't mean anything when comparing uBTC to mBTC.  Many people just stopped thinking at the mBTC level, do not 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 also flawed, in that 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.  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.  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.

I haven't seen a single good argument for keeping it in mBTC (other than some people already did it).  On the other hand, I've seen numerous great reasons for switching to uBTC.

My two cents.


On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 11:39 AM, Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com> wrote:



On 13 March 2014 16:50, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 3:32 PM, Jeff Garzik <jgarzik@bitpay.com> wrote:
Such hand-wavy, data-free logic is precisely why community
coordination is preferred to random apps making random decisions in
this manner.

That ship sailed months ago. If you wanted a big push for uBTC, then would have been the time. Though given that it'd have made lots of normal balances incredibly huge, perhaps it's a good thing that didn't happen. Also "milli" is a unit people encounter in daily life whereas micro isn't. Is it milli / micro / nano or milli / nano / micro? I bet a lot of people would get that wrong.

If you have to export to financial packages that can't handle fractional pennies, then by all means represent prices in whatever units you like for that purpose, but in software designed for ordinary people in everyday life mBTC is a pretty good fit.
 
Besides, fractional pennies crop up in existing currencies too (the famous Verizon Math episode showed this), so if a financial package insists on rounding to 2dp then I guess it may sometimes do the wrong thing in some business cases already.

Fundamentally, 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.

Lots of people use currencies that don't have any fractional components at all ! So perhaps all prices should be denominated in satoshis to ensure that they're not surprised :)

The (number) line has to be drawn somewhere. Wallets are free to suppress more than 2dp of precision and actually Andreas' app lets you choose your preferred precision. So I think 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.

+1 agree with Mike on everything

A couple of points:

1. bitcoinity already switched to mbtc aka millitbits ( https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/MilliBit ) and it was positively recieved, they got quite a few donations

2. 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 (If I understood correctly)

I think it's up to wallet maintainers whether to switch the default. 

 

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