Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: What if I owned 1.234;567;89 BTC instead of 1.23456789 BTC?
by
GOB
on 01/10/2013, 17:27:22 UTC
why choose 3 as a place for seperators....why not one after 4 places as in 1.2345,6789

much easier IMO although I prefer none

on that note ,realize that in usd , the value to make  the last digit worth even a cent has to surpass

drumroll...1 mil !

a dime       "      0.1         "    "    "      "            (at startup)
1 usd                0.01                                      (few tears ago)
10 usd              0.001                                    (recently)
100usd renders 0.0001 equal to one cent         (currently)
1,000usd          0.00001                                 (possibly)
10,000usd        0.000001                                not likely
100,000usd      0.0000001                              dollar died by this time
1million usd      0.0000,0001                           no contest- btc declared world currency

therefore anyone betting in the last four digits are joking around wasting time or expecting future winnings to be  worth  a few thousand dollars if the last scenario happens. betting at the fifth level and waiting for economic armegeddon might be worth it   but most likley no one w food gives a rats ass about btc and people are knifing each other for that to happen!

btw is that an android v 20 you've got there (stab,stab!)

Please note that my point here isn't that this is necessary because we're going to 1BTC=$1 million soon. Rather, my point is that we, as bitcoiners, are dealing with numbers with 8 decimal places on a regular basis now, for a variety of reasons. Perhaps there is no tradition for thousandths  separators as there is for thousands separators because there simply hasn't been much of need for it till now.

I'll give you one example that I run into every day: betting on Just-Dice. Which is bet is larger? 0.0000120 or 0.00000875? I know you can count the zeros, but it wasn't obvious at first glance, was it? Now look at the column of bets on just dice. True, a bet of a couple hundred satoshi is just as insignificant in dollars as a bet of a few thousand satoshi, but one is 10x the other. If you're running a bot to martingale (for example), slipping up on one zero can make a world of difference.

This is the very reason we have thousands separators: it makes it easier to identify numbers with a quick glance (what's larger? 23402455945 or 6942382230? What if I asked like this: 23,402,455,945 or 6,942,382,230?)