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Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 12:14:20 -0400
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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] moving the default display to mbtc
Precedence: list

On 03/13/2014 10:32 AM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 9:53 AM, Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net> wrote:
>> BitPay should use mBTC as well. Unless you can point to any major wallets,
>> exchanges or price watching sites that use uBTC by default?
>>
>> I think it is highly optimistic to assume we'll need another 1000x shift any
>> time soon. By now Bitcoin isn't obscure anymore. Lots of people have heard
> Such hand-wavy, data-free logic is precisely why community
> coordination is preferred to random apps making random decisions in
> this manner.
>
> mBTC is problematic because you do not need 1000x shift in value to
> produce annoyances for major accounting packages that are hard-limited
> to two decimal places.  Further, spreadsheets hide information if
> formatting is configured naively -- that is, if formatting is
> configured for bitcoin the way it is configured for other currencies.
>
> 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.
>

I whole-heartedly agree with Jeff.  micro-BTC was the way to go to end
user confusion and make things easier for software systems which are
designed to handle money (i.e. two decimal places).  I also echo the
sentiment about people being able to handle large numbers well. 

We've been working with Marty Zigman who's creating a Bitcoin plugin for
NetSuite accounting platform, and he was already forced to switch
micro-BTC long ago for exactly the reasons described above.  I think the
system will track up to 3 decimal places without causing all sorts of
heartache and automatic rounding.

Of course, as Mike said, this ship may have already sailed, but if
there's any way to revisit this, I'm there.  We're just about to do
another Armory release and could support this very easily.