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Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] "bits": Unit of account
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On 5/2/14, 10:41 PM, Aaron Voisine wrote:
> I have to agree with Mike. Human language is surprisingly tolerant of
> overloading and inference from context. Neurotypical people have no
> problem with it and perceive a software engineer's aversion to it as
> being pedantic and strange. Note that "bits" was a term for a unit of
> money long before the invention of digital computers.
Of course people *can* manage, when they need to; natural language is
full of such overloading. But the clashes are not costless, they add
mental load for first-time learners and low-context users.
So the concern is, when there's a free choice, why not bootstrap words
that are less fragile and context-dependent? Why add extra comprehension
gotchas into what is already a challenging domain?
And it's exactly the aspect that makes 'bit' attractive – "it's right
there in the name _Bit_coin!" – that equally presents the clash –
because the sense of 'bit' honored in the "Bitcoin" name, and central to
the systems' essential properties, is the binary digit.
It's like intentionally introducing a 'false friend' word-correlation
between the vernacular of the casual Bitcoin user, and the language of
Bitcoin experts. And the word pair is nearly auto-antonymic in some
essential dimensions: indivisible vs. divisible, base-2 vs. base-10,
composed-geometrically vs. composed-arithmetically.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_friend - interferes w/ lang learning
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
In naming amounts, there's no desperate need to stay in the shallow
crowded pool of words just derived from "bit" and "coin". Real
currencies have many names for their units, including subunits with
highly-unrelated sounds. The contrasting words help create more shades
of meaning for different purposes. Some examples:
dollars/bucks - bits (1/8ths) - dimes (1/10ths) - cents (1/100ths)
pounds/quid - shillings (1/20ths) - pence (1/100th; formerly 1/240th)
yuan/kuai - jiao (1/10ths) - fen (1/100ths)
Regarding the cute example of contextual disambiguation...
On 5/3/14, 11:15 PM, Aaron Voisine wrote:
> Bit by bit, it's become clear that it's a bit much to worry even a
> little bit that overloading the word "bit" would be every bit as bad
> as a two bit horse with the bit between it's teeth that bit the hand
> that feeds it, or a drill bit broken to bits after just a bit of use.
That there are many existing definitions doesn't reassure that one
*extra* definition will still be costless, especially for
low-literacy/low-context/low-numeracy users or learners.
Note that this example *doesn't* showcase the new proposed
'100-satoshi-value' usage, nor activate the 'binary digit' meaning. (It
does activate the "part/quantity, usually small or imprecise" sense of
'bit', 7 times depending on how you classify the idioms.)
Try instead this mash of concepts, which someone deciding whether to
trust 'bits' will face:
"Bitcoin uses the digital science of bits, the indivisible 1s and 0s of
computer logic, to create a networked money measured in bits, which
split into 100 indivisible cents called satoshis. Bit amounts are
represented as 64-bit integer counts of 1/100th of a bit, so 64-bit
integers can represent any balance from the smallest positive bit total,
0.01 bits (integer 1), up to a number over 92 quintillion bits (2^63-1,
integer 9,223,372,036,854,775,808).
That max value won't be needed, though, because a crucial bit of the
original Satoshi design is a maximum issuance of 21,000,000,000,000.00
bits (21 trillion bits, 21 terabits). These new bits are awarded to
computers racing to complete a digital verification task on an
algorithmic schedule: currently 25 million bits (25 megabits) arrive
about every 10 minutes. That is, the total number of Bitcoin bits is
increasing at 6.33 Kbps, though that arrival slows to 0 bps by around
the year 2140.
The most important bit to remember is that your ability to spend bits is
controlled by secret 256-bit numbers, called private keys, bits of info
that only you know. The fact that these keys are 256-bits long is what
makes them practically unguessable, even if someone had a computing
budget of all the bits in the world, or built a computer out of all the
bits in the universe. (That is, even though the network can create 25
million bits every 10 minutes, it can't guess your secret 256 bits in
the lifetime of the universe!)
Watch out, though: human-chosen passwords and 4-8 word phrases typically
provide much less than 128 bits of security, far too little to create a
256-bit key. And in the math of bits, having half as many bits doesn't
mean half the security, it means the square-root as much security. (For
a 128-bit shortfall, that's 2^128 or 340 billion billion billion billion
times less strength.)
If your secret has enough bits, though, you can be confident that you
can put millions of dollars into bits, because of the cryptographic
power of hundreds of bits. The current value of a bit is 1/20th of a US
cent, so 256 bits has the purchasing power of about 11¢.
If you say you've got a bit of bitcoin in your wallet, I'll need you to
be a bit more specific. If you've got one bit of bitcoin, you've got
1/20th of a cent worth, an insignificant bit. But if you've got one
bitcoin, you've got about $440 worth, quite a bit! Now you know a bit
about Bitcoin, where your highly-valuable bits are protected by the
science of bits. Get some bits now, they're small and still cheap, what
is there to lose?"
Now, most people may never need to understand binary digits and
information science. But if a future of widespread cryptocurrency
success comes to pass, more people than ever before will want (and need)
to understand the basics, and we can help them with clear terminology.
I'd also point out to those who've built their brands around the word
'bit' that while it may seem grand to have the currency's most-common
unit in your name/logo, you might wind up snake-bit. How?
*If* 'bit' is effectively bootstrapped to mean a tangible amount that
people understand intuitively for everyday commerce, that amount is
currently tiny (1/20th of a USD cent) and would still be tiny (10¢) if
bitcoin appreciates in value over 200x to USD$100K per bitcoin.
So "bitpay" starts reading as "penny-pay" – and under an optimistic
appreciation scenario might someday read as "dime-pay".
"bitsofproof" reads as "pennies-of-proof" or someday "dimes-of-proof".
- Gordon
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