Tiny fractions of Bitcoin have real value, but it’s maddening to use such absurdly small numbers.

There is a longstanding problem with the Bitcoin’s user experience, and this problem grows along with Bitcoin’s price. Luckily, it’s easily solvable.

This UX issue has nothing to do with user-interface or interaction design, but is instead typographical in nature — it involves the format by which amounts of Bitcon are typically expressed.

Bitcoin is divisible to 100 million units, called satoshis. This means that a typical amount of bitcoin can be expressed using as many as eight digits after the decimal point.

These fractional amounts are hard to read because fractional digits conventionally aren’t grouped for readability the way that whole numbers are (e.g. with commas as thousands-separators, such as 10,000,000).

Below, I’ll propose a format for grouping fractional amounts of bitcoin that makes it easy to digest the fractional portion of the number, and as a bonus, makes it trivially easy to interpret the amount as satoshis or whole bitcoins.

Consider the following, arbitrary number of dollars:

That’s pretty easy — thanks to digit-grouping with commas, it reads instantly as about $112 million.

Now, consider a random sum of Bitcoin:

This is obviously a small fraction of one Bitcoin, but how much? $1 worth? $100?

The answer is that it is 8960 satoshis, or around 9 hundred-thousandths of a bitcoin, or around $3 at the current exchange rate of $33k per BTC. (Starting from the rightmost digit, you might have quickly read the number as 896 sats, but I deviously showed only seven trailing digits after the decimal instead of eight.)

Even if you’re used to thinking in satoshis, 0.0000896 is a difficult string of digits to interpret compared to whole numbers, because there’s no digit-grouping after the decimal point.

Many would insist that the solution is to simply for the world to switch to sats. With the rising value of bitcoin, these folks might say, it becomes ever more absurd to express amounts of bitcoin as bitcoins, and human minds aren’t well equipped to think in tiny fractions. Instead, the world must mentally re-base Bitcoin into satoshi terms, and all our wallets, exchanges, and price feeds will eventually follow suit. And when we all think in terms of thousands, or millions of satoshis; typical, real-world amounts of bitcoin will reside comfortably in whole-number land, complete with handy digit separators.

While I agree that satoshis will increasingly be the unit of choice for day-to-day bitcoin usage — as can be seen already with consumer apps like Fold and Lolli — this will not solve our readability problem for written sub-1 BTC amounts, because expressing bitcoin amounts in BTC units rather than sats may prove to be quite durable, even for smaller amounts.

The price of a bitcoin is a big, sexy number that will retain its hold on the world’s imagination — moreso as the number grows ever larger (we hope!). And the BTC unit will likely remain dominant in the worlds of corporate finance and financial institutions — the financial press will probably never announce the latest Microstrategy buy of a hundred billion-odd sats.

Moreover, applications like exchanges and blockchain explorers will probably always use BTC as their bitcoin unit of choice because they need to list large and small amounts together in a common format. Consider this screen grab showing a list of unconfirmed bitcoin transactions:

Basically, there will always be situations in which very small amounts of bitcoin have to be shown alongside large amounts consisting of more than 1 BTC, and in those situations, bitcoins rather than sats will be the unit of choice, through both inertia and the awkwardness of showing gazillion-scale quantities of satoshis.

However, I’m not really arguing at all against anyone who chooses to use sats as their preferred unit. What I am saying is that grouping digits in the fractional portion can give us the best of both worlds — when digit grouping makes the fractional amount is instantly digestible, the reader can easily interpret the number as satoshis or BTC as appropriate, as I’ll argue below. In that case, it doesn’t matter whether an amount is written as fractional BTC, because the user can easily read the written number as satoshis or BTC as appropriate.

However, for this to occur, standardization is needed on how fractional digits are grouped, and I think there’s an ideal way to do this that is specific to Bitcoin.

Consider the following amount:

One might assume that the fractional-digit separator should come after three digits, and then repeat every three digits after that, to be symmetrical with the thousands separators for digits before the decimal, like this (I’m using a mid-dot as a separator, but will propose a more practical character later):

However, for bitcoin, it would be best to place the first separator after two digits, and then separate every three digits thereafter:

Why? Because that way, the fractional portion follows the same grouping as thousands separators for the same amount expressed in satoshis.

Once you’re used to fractional digits being grouped this way, it’s trivially easy to read it as denominated in BTC or sats as appropriate.

This grouping also makes it easier to interpret fractional sums with fewer than eight digits shown after the decimal point. Without grouping, it may not be immediately clear how many fractional digits are shown. With grouping, readers will quickly come to recognize the first separator as the million-sat divider, and the second as thousands. Therefore, comprehension isn’t affected even if the fractional portion is truncated to an arbitrary number of digits:

With grouping, the example amount I used to begin this article would be obvious at a glance as being nearly 9000, not 900, satoshis.

And finally, very large amounts of BTC can be listed heterogeneously with very small amounts with no loss of comprehension at either extreme.

If you’re still with me, one question remains: which character we should use for our digit separator?

I’d argue that it shouldn’t be the same character that’s used as the thousands separator (which, in the USA, would be the comma). The fractional separator should be distinct visually from the thousands separator so it’s instantly clear that we’re on the right side of the decimal point. And a visually unique separator makes sense for a bitcoin-specific convention.

Finally, it should be easily typeable. Sometimes in typesetting, a mid-dot, like I used above, or a half-space character is used to group digits. This might be fine for display in print or an on-screen user interface, but typeability is important — just as most people use thousands separators when writing out numbers without a second thought, they should be able bang out the after-decimal separators while touch-typing. Who wants to type a mid-dot or a half-space? If you need to look up how to type it, people ain’t gonna use it!

Without further ado, my candidate is the apostrophe. It’s easily typeable, and is also distinct from the various other digit separators used throughout the world. (However, it’s not totally without precedent — apparently the apostrophe is used as a digit separator in C++.)

Here are a few examples showing the apostrophe as divider:

(The example uses a straight apostrophe rather than a “curly,” directional one, which I think looks less awkward for this use.)

Could you get used to it? I could!

If this idea catches on at all, maybe the best way to get the ball rolling on this would be for the various crypto-related UIs of the world, such as exchanges, trackers, and wallets, to start separating fractional digits, ideally with the grouping I’ve suggested. (Easy, right?) Then, if it really catches on, applications like spreadsheets could be modified to use apostrophes or some other character as fractional digit separators, or at least tolerate them.

I do recall seeing at least one crypto-related UI in the wild that grouped fractional digits in a similar fashion to what I’m suggesting, so I don’t make any claim on the uniqueness of this idea. I only hope the world comes together and adopts some sensible convention for grouping fractional digits in crypto— selfishly, because I like things to be readable!

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Source: https://medium.com/@mark.nugent.iv/grouping-bitcoins-fractional-digits-an-idea-whose-time-has-come-22d9dad8ac51?source=rss——-8—————–cryptocurrency