Will Bitnote Become the Term of Art for Mainstream Bitcoiners?
With the meteoric rise in price of Bitcoin, we have a decimalization problem.
If you wanted to buy a cup of coffee with bitcoins today, the point-of-sale register would quote a price of 0.0027760 BTC. For early adopters of Bitcoin, that’s easy enough to understand. But what about normal consumers?
A new proposal, called BitNote, is looking to solve this.
“Bitnote is a freely available Bit-currency price quoting system that anyone can use,” say its creators Joey Cofone and Adam Kornfield.
Taking inspiration from data storage math – byte, KB, MB, and GB – the conversion from Bitcoin to Bitnote is similar: 1 Bitcoin = 1,024 Bitnotes
“This simply provides an easier presentation and naming mechanism that people are far more accustomed with,” explained the Bitnote team. “The more people can name and understand their currency units, the more likely they are to embrace Bitcoin.”
For example, instead of quoting a movie ticket as 0.021513 Bitcoins it now becomes 22.03 Bitnotes. Same value, easier means of understanding.
The team has also proposed a currency symbol for Bitnote, explaining “All good currency symbols—such as the British Pound, US Dollar, or Japanese Yen—have carefully crafted currency symbols. This takes a combination of simplicity, uniqueness, and ease of replication (both digitally and by hand), which we applied in taking the Bit-currency symbols to the next level.”
What about mBTC?
Bitnote is not the first concept to address the running decimals of Bitcoin. Most people in the Bitcoin world have become comfortable with breaking down 1 Bitcoin as follows:
- 1 mBTC (milli-bitcoin) = 1/1,000 BTC
- 1 µBTC (micro-bitcoin) = 1/1,000,000 BTC
- 1 satoshi = 1/100,000,000 BTC
This system allows for a future where, if 1 BTC is worth $1 million, we can still buy coffee with satoshis.
As Bitcoin is a decentralized system, there is no governing body to dictate whether Bitnote or mBTC becomes the term of art for the mainstream. Only time will tell.
Learn more about Bitnote at www.bitnote.co.
One ’0′ missing for micro-bitcion!
I think that using steps of 1000 and not 1024 is much more natural when we think about price and money, even for computer scientists.
Thanks for catching the typo! We’ve fixed the mBTC note.
[…] that’s easy enough to understand. But what about normal consumers? A new proposal, called BitNote, is looking to solve this through a new currency symbol and a mathematical formula to make that cup […]