Quote from: casascius on February 06, 2011, 09:52:16 PM

If you want to teach people what essentially amounts to counting in binary, start an education reform agenda. Persuade teachers to teach the binary code to young children. Until then, leave Bitcoin alone with it. This is wholly impractical nonsense, and you should not pollute Bitcoin with it. I think the world would benefit greatly if kids could natively count in hex, but this is a frivolous attempt to make that happen.

The purpose of Bitcoin is to offer the world a competing store of value, not to compel them to switch to count in hexadecimal and to use a foreign language for doing so. This is a world where the vast majority of its inhabitants are completely comfortable counting in base ten. Kudos to Satoshi for defining base-ten fractions as the de facto fraction for Bitcoin.

If you believe the "education" systems (in any country) are useful at all, you're quite frankly deluded. If anyone learns anything in them, it's because of the rare teacher who cares, or the rare student who seeks knowledge. The only real teachers are parents. I am one of those real teachers, and I am sticking to Tonal. Bitcoin is a useful to tonal users because it allows us to exchange currency in our native/preferred number system, rather than have to work in decimal for monetary exchanges (even with others who hate decimal).

Remember, Decimal BitCoin doesn't cease to exist because of Tonal BitCoin. Your irrational/fanatical oppression is not helpful. Use what you want, but let us use what we want. BitCoin can either gain the adoption of the Tonal community, or lose it by insisting we all switch to decimal (in which case, there is frankly no benefit over our local fiat currencies-- why switch at all when more people accept the fiat?). If BitCoin only appeals to the libertarian niche, it will never gain widespread adoption. You (and others) need to recognize that if you want BitCoin to succeed, you must be open to ideals that don't appeal to you personally.