Date: Thu, 13 Mar 2014 11:17:53 -0500
From: Troy Benjegerdes <hozer@hozed.org>
To: Mike Hearn <mike@plan99.net>
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Cc: Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>,
	Wendell <w@grabhive.com>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] moving the default display to mbtc
Precedence: list

On Thu, Mar 13, 2014 at 04:50:14PM +0100, Mike Hearn 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.

I think the ship of hand-wavy, data-free logic sailed with 
'money supply == 21 million', so why not enjoy the ride? If we care about
real people and real use cases, then let's talk about indexing the money 
supply to some blockchain-observable value and add demurrage instead of 
of bikeshedding the color of the latest coat of paint.

> 
> 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 :)

I'm surprised every time I pull up to a gas pump and the price is 3.249999
per gallon. But I don't really care what the price is, as long as there's 
an e85 pump. If I could pay at the pump with bitcoin, I wouldn't even look
at the price, I'd only care if my tank got filled up or if I have to drive
slower to get better mileage.

Hell, I'd have an app that would tell me what gas station to go to that got
me the best miles per bitcoin based on where I actually wanted to go.