Bitcent?

Maybe it’s time to think about smaller monetary unit, which will equal 1/100 of the bitcoin? Or even smaller one, 1/1000? It may be called bitcent (BTCN) or somehow other. Or it won’t be good looking, when in the “bitcoin economy” of the future (maybe nearest future) most things will cost “0,0251 BTC”, “0,003 BTC” and so on. Not very convenient.

I like ribuck’s terminology:

http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=3311.msg46648#msg46648

He suggests bitcents, then millicents and microcents. Microcents happen to be the smallest available subdivision of bitcoins, so this works nicely.

I can’t wait to use satoshi to denote a very small fraction of bitcoin .

1 satoshi = 1 microbitcent (smallest denomination)

100 million satoshis = 1 bitcoin

Are we agreed?

MQuote from: moa on February 18, 2011, 8:50:57 AM UTC

1 satoshi = 1 microbitcent (smallest denomination)

100 million satoshis = 1 bitcoin

Are we agreed?

Affirmative.

0.9 microbitcoins is much easier to pronounce and pick up on. Consumers already use this when they speak of RAM and hard disk space in megabytes and gigabytes. IT corporations teaches them similar concepts. IT corporations don’t say this computer has 2,147,483,648 bytes of RAM. They say this computer has 2 gigabytes of RAM because it is way easier to communicate across to the consumer.

Your example with RAM is wrong in the sense that it is on the other side of the decimal point, kilos, megas and gigas not millis, micros and nanos … I’m struggling to think of a common usage of terms over many orders of magnitude on the right of the decimal point … ppm and ppb.

The easiest way out of all this is to give a name, any name, to the smallest denomination, BTC 1e-08 = 1 Satoshi, and then go up from there … upwards in orders of magnitude is much more familiar and commonly used than downwards.

e.g;
100 million satoshis = 1 BTC
10 million sts = 0.1 BTC
1 million sts = 0.01 BTC
100 thousand sts = 0.001 BTC
10 thousand sts = 0.000 1 BTC
1 thousand sts = 0.000 01 BTC
1 hundred sts = 0.000 001 BTC
10 sts = 0.000 000 1 BTC
1 sts = 0.000 000 01 BTC

I bet you 100 million sts it works out something like this.

People seem to be asking for a convention that meets these criteria:

1. It can be scaled downwards as far as needed

2. It is based on divisions of 1000 like the SI system

3. It uses the familiarity of 100 “subcoins” per “coin”.

Here’s how we can do it.

For now, we use Bitcoins as the “main” unit. For convenience and familiarity, we “usually” use two decimal places (e.g. 0.15 or 2.63) which gives us a resolution of one bitcent.

If bitcoins become significantly more valuable, we can start expressing prices in milli-bitcoins (nickname “mills”) and milli-bitcents (nickname “millicents”). So 0.02 bitcoins would be 20.00 mills, and 0.15 mills would be 15 millicents.

If bitcoins become even more valuable, we start expressing prices in micro-bitcoins (nickname “mikes”) and micro-bitcents (nickname “satoshis”). So 0.02 mills would be 20.00 mikes, and 0.15 mikes would be 15 satoshis.

This caters for everything down to the current base unit, but if ever a finer resolution is needed we just continue the pattern: nano-bitcoins, pico-bitcoins etc.