Quote from: kbriggs on February 11, 2011, 07:49:16 PM

Quote from: kiba on February 11, 2011, 07:41:35 PM

Quote from: kbriggs on February 11, 2011, 07:39:57 PM

Yes, really. We're not normal, we're geeks. Like everyone else reading this.

I swear that everyone in school learned this stuff!

I learned a lot of crap in school and retained it only to the next test. Ask your mother if she knows what scientific notation is.

Exactly. It may be on the school curriculum, but most people have no interest in, or a need to use, scientific notation. Or any numbers outside of what they have to deal with in their daily life. And what you don't use, you lose.

If bitcoin wants to be taken seriously by a wider audience, it will need to address this. It is (or will be) one more hurdle to acceptance, and there are more than enough hurdles for an idea like bitcoin to deal with in the first place.

Quote from: FatherMcGruder on February 11, 2011, 07:53:55 PM

Americans used to describe their currency in cents. Then as it inflated, people came to refer to dollars, Benjamins, and grands. Same thing with Bitcoin, except the trends will follow deflation.

The rate of this change is fairly key to the discussion. If the change from bitcoins to milli-bitcoins happens over a couple of generations, fine. If it happens in the space of 10 years, that's a problem.

People need to be able to compare prices over time to be able to make useful decisions about purchases now compared to the past, and their relative value. Large-scale deflation raises the same problems with this, and with menu costs, as large-scale inflation does.