Post
Topic
Board Bitcoin Discussion
Re: Bitcoin needs something equivalent to a stock split
by
LMGTFY
on 19/03/2014, 18:00:25 UTC
I see that there is a big unification towards the "millibit" terminology, but I think that is too confusing for the average person.  In the united states, we have resisted switching to the Metric system because "it's just too damn confusing." (which is insane, because inches and feet are arbitrary.  We should have switched to the metric system ages ago.)
Maybe the average person in US. But fortunately, everybody else uses the confusing metric system and since bitcoin is a global currency that just seems fair. Besides, you don't have prefixes in imperial system (at least afaik) and no one wants to own 50 foot bitcoins.

I wonder how true that is for the US? Presumably folk in the US have gone through a couple of decades of bytes, kilobytes, megabytes, gigabytes and terabytes? For that matter, surely people in the US are familiar with expressing numbers like this -> 1,000,000,000.000,000,001 <- ?

I guess I just don't buy this "it's too confusing for some people" argument. The first time I bought real estate it involved a learning curve; but I needed to do it (buy a house) so I made the effort to learn the jargon, the regulations and the units used in the locale. If people need to do something, they learn how to do it. And the learning required for Bitcoin, compared with purchasing property, is pretty minimal (fairly minimal jargon, no regulations, the units are familiar to anyone who's bought a hard drive). Maybe I just have more faith in other people's friends and elderly relatives.