Add mentions and definitions for bits

[saivann]

Live preview: (Merged)

"Bits" seems to be passing the test of time with a rough consensus in the community, quite strong support on social networks, positive comments from developers and increasing adoption by users, wallets and merchant tools. Recent experiments with changetips also seem to show bits are fixing design issues for the end user.

This pull req adds a mention for bits where other units are mentioned and a definition both in the vocabulary and devel-docs. To avoid confusion in devel-docs, microbit and millibit are renamed to microbitcoin and millibitcoin.

Maybe at some point in the future, using bits instead of mBTC in devel-docs's images and examples could also be worth considering?

[harding]

s/there is 1,000,000/there are 1,000,000/

[harding]

Dev docs changes LGTM. Except for the note above, the other text changes LGTM also. Thanks!

Updating the micropayment channel illustration to use satoshis like the other examples has been on my low-priority todo list for ages; now that op_checklocktimeverify is under discussion, I'll probably wait for it to be merged and then update the entire section to use it.

[saivann]

@harding Agreed, satoshis make more sense in devel-docs.

Would it make sense to add thousands separators after the decimal mark (for better readability)?

[harding]

@saivann I kind of like the way you did it in part of the main site with a space. However---and I haven't really thought this through---it seems to me the separator mark should separate hundredths from thousandths and hundreds of thousandths from millionths, as those seem to be logical groupings to me. E.g. satoshis should be 0.00 000 001.

But, like I said, I really haven't thought about, so whatever you think is best works for me.

[luke-jr]

Disagree, the only "rough consensus" I've seen is opposition to "bits", and even the notable people who support it seem to agree it is merely an informal way to refer to microbitcoins.

[jgarzik]

Yes, "bits" is certainly informal and always will be.

[saivann]

After more reading, it is true that I may be over-estimating the consensus on this, although I still find a lot of support too, so I have reverted parts of this pull req so bitcoin.org doesn't "push" for bits, and only make sure it's defined and used in one FAQ example.

I guess my point is that this term is being commonly used today, especially for tipping, and is adopted or being adopted by major businesses in the space (Coinbase, BlockChain, KnC, Xapo and BitPay), and therefore is worth at least being documented for that reason.

This pull request actually also makes the language more neutral with both "bits" and "BTC", as otherwise BTC is currently described more or less like the official ISO unit, although there's no such thing.

[harding]

@saivann oh, I just noticed that bits is autocrossref'd in the dev docs, leading to collisions with binary bits. For example, see the bloom filter section: http://bitcointest1.us.to/en/developer-guide#bloom-filters

As binary bits will likely always be more common in the dev docs, I recommend removing the autoxref and using manual links, perhaps using the autoxref format: [bits][]{:.auto-link}

[luke-jr]

µBTC (aka "bits")

[saivann]

@harding Thanks! I indeed forgot to check for collisions, will disable it in a moment.

[luke-jr]

Half-spaces seem standard for post-decimal delimiting.

[saivann]

In the absence of critical feedback, this pull request will be merged on November 11th.