It's time we had the option to kill the decimal.

In the coming months and years, we all expect that Bitcoin will grow a great deal in value. One of the things that I think is standing it the way of its success is something that is only talked about rarely; how ridiculously awkward it is to describe the price of a relatively inexpensive item (say $10) in terms of a decimal in Bitcoin

At current prices that $10 would be 0.00117647 BTC. Even worse that looking at that number is trying to verbalize it. Once Bitcoin hit $100, I think that the convention was ill-suited for everyday transactions due to it being the very definition of cumbersome to describe a price in BTC.

For years I've argued that if we could just move the decimal to the right 8 decimal places, we could permanently do away with the confusion of 'Milibits" and leading zeros altogether. I'm not even going to get into the other HUGE issue of people's reluctance to invest thousands of dollars in something only to have shavings of that something rather than (at least) a unit of that thing.

At this time Bitcoin needs an overhaul. This is what I propose:

The decimal moves 8 places to the right, right now. That's it. The end. Now, look how nice and easy it is to work with pure Satoshi;

When buying something very inexpensive such as a $1 candybar, you would describe the item for sale in Kilo-Satoshi (thousands of Satoshi), or 'kiloSat', or 'kSat', or possibly even 'kS'.

So instead of listing a $1 candy bar as 0.00012000 BTC... which is unreadable and unsayable. You would instead list the item as... ready for this? "12 kS" (Twelve kilo-Sat when spoken out loud). "Yeah, the grocery store has a sale on candy bars. Three for 30 kS".

The system I propose works equally well for very expensive items:

At the current Bitcoin price, a brand-new, top of the line Mac-Book Pro ($2399.00) would be listed under this new convention as: 28,000 kS. A 2018 Honda Accord ($23,570)? Easy... that's 277,000,000 kS, or when spoken: "Two-Hundred and Seventy-Seven Million Kilo-Sat". Or if you prefer: 2.8 BTC.

Another reason this naming convention is valuable, is because relative value is introduced as well.

And should the bitcoin price rise, rise, and rise... then we will one day drop down to individual units of Satoshi in order to buy things like candy bars. Then it might be 3 candy bars for 50 Sat.

Now, I understand that this is never going to happen to the software itself. This proposal is for the wallets of tomorrow to include this convention as a way of simplifying and making more accessible and attractive the use of this thing we all love.

I welcome feedback.

Submitted February 12, 2018 at 06:54PM by davidcwilliams http://ift.tt/2EnA1jj