Rationale ======= Given the recent rise in value there seems to be anecdotal evidence that 1 bitcoin being so high is putting off a lot of normal buyers, because they feel that putting down $400+ and only getting "1 coin", or having to buy in multiples of 1 whole coin, is too much.. only after it being explained that they can buy fractional amounts to they regain interest, apparently happening increasingly. Straw Poll ======== 6 months ago there was a straw poll on this https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=220322.0 Roughly 2/3 of respondents favoured switching A further 20% said to switch after it hits 1000 Satoshi's comments: ================ Eventually at most only 21 million coins for 6.8 billion people in the world if it really gets huge. But don't worry, there are another 6 decimal places that aren't shown, for a total of 8 decimal places internally. It shows 1.00 but internally it's 1.00000000. If there's massive deflation in the future, the software could show more decimal places. If it gets tiresome working with small numbers, we could change where the display shows the decimal point. Same amount of money, just different convention for where the ","'s and "."'s go. e.g. moving the decimal place 3 places would mean if you had 1.00000 before, now it shows it as 1,000.00. https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=44.msg267#msg267 Would now be a good time to start thinking about changing the default display in the software. Perhaps initially it could be a dropdown display option, then at some point mbtc becomes the default?