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Board Beginners & Help
Re: is this a coincidence?
by
gfoot
on 05/04/2013, 13:55:48 UTC
Two problems:

1) You're trying to redefine kilo-, mega-, giga-, tera-, etc to mean values less than 1 - we already have prefixes for that (milli-, micro-, etc)
2) You're trying to define them as powers of 100 rather than 1000 - we also have prefixes for some of those and could build others more consistently (e.g. centi-, decimilli-, micro-)

I think it's OK to use the base-100 system for convenience, with familiar terms such as "cent" or "bitcent", but we should reserve the SI prefixes for their usual meanings, and use those alongside as necessary.  Also given that nobody knows how much bitcoins will be worth next month, don't get too attached to binding terminology to current fiat currency values (so don't try to call 0.01BTC a "bollar" or a "bit-dollar" or whatever, it will just be wrong again sometime in the future).

For colloquial, non-SI usage, most currencies end up using new words that are completely different to each other, as "penny" is to "pound", or "dime", "nickel", "dollar", or "farthing", "shilling", "crown", etc.