Quote from: franky1 on May 03, 2014, 09:44:51 PM

satoshi is a meaning collision and for a good reason. to honour the creator. so it is relevant

zib seems to alien or foreign... i prefer:
1gav - to honour Gavin Andressens years of coding bitcoin protocol
1alp - to honour the first LEGITIMATE business using bitcoin (alpaca socks)
1silk - i dont like this, but atleast it has some relevance, as the notorious site silkroad, that gave bitcoin fame ("any publicity is good publicity")

I'd throw in consideration for the "back" to honor Adam Back, creator of the hashcash algorithm used as bitcoin's proof of work. He has a direct contribution to bitcoin, and a pioneering and integral one at that. Short of Satoshi him/her/themself, I can't think of anyone whose work is more explicitly embodied in the bitcoin software. Honestly, we really owe Adam an enormous debt of gratitude for his contribution. This would be a fitting honor to place his name alongside Satoshi's.

Plus Adam's name is short and sweet, like "bit", without having the prior confusion of other uses of bit. (how is a millibit equal to 1000 bits, anyway?)

Finally, back sounds like money. It's similar to "buck" and rolls off the tongue just as easily. Not only that, there's no accent or dialect which commingles the "uh" of buck and "aa" of back, so they can't be confused. It would be like confusing the words "faq" and "fuck". To boot, It also has the additional connotation of "greenback", another good money association.

Think about it. Doesn't "ten thousand backs" have a visceral ring to it? It sounds like money. Isn't that one of the most important qualities we could impart to our choice of word? Bitcoin sounds like money because coins are money. Bit by itself loses that advantage while back doesn't. "256 bits" sounds like computer gobbledy-gook to the layperson, but while they may not immediately know what 256 backs are, it sure sounds like it's money.

I'd also submit that the symbol for it should be lower case thorn: http://www.theasciicode.com.ar/extended-ascii-code/lowercase-letter-thorn-ascii-code-231.html: "þ". Thorn has two major advantages:

a) it's plain ascii. Any computer system or programming language (I'm looking at you, financial institutions) can use it. It doesn't require unicode support. If we want 100% market penetration, we can't underestimate how many old, non-unicode systems there are out there which will never be upgraded to support it. Unicode support is frickin hard.

b) more importantly, it will not drive web developers insane having to remember an arbitrary alt-code. Thorn already has an html entity, "þ". Anyone can remember and type that, and you don't have to hold and release a modifier key for a multi-digit code to do it.

Seriously folks, this naming process is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. This term could be used for decades, even centuries to come. Do we really have to shoot our load after a few minutes of consideration or can we take the time to really come up with an acceptable idea?

binaryphile

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