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Comment by anonfunction | Hacker News Reader

Why the scientific notation?

    3.436e3 $/BTC now

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From http://cryptomarketplot.com/cmp-faq.html :

What exactly does 1.23e-4 means? Why do you use the computer form of scientific notation?

We use scientific notation to remove the leadings zeroes. What is simpler to read quickly, 0.000123 or 1.23e-4? If you trade crypto, you usually already know by heart how many zeroes are in front, and what is the approximate price range - you only care about the changes of the non zeroes. If the price goes from 0.000123 to 0.000142 we can save a lot of space on the screen by just writing 1.23e-4 and 1.42e-4. This way, the changes jump out and you read more numbers faster.

(...)

We use the computer form of scientific notation. 1.23e-4 instead of 1.23*10^-4, because this saves a lot of space of the screen. Scientific papers and traditional researchers may frown upon this "degenerate notation." But we absolutely love this concise and elegal notation! It may be a good thing we are in business, and not in the ivory tower of academia! We get more freedom to write numbers how we damn like!!

Yeah it’s not. My first thought was that you had messed up large integers with javascript. I’m probably not the only one who thought that.

> What is simpler to read quickly, 0.000123 or 1.23e-4?

0.000123

And between 0.00000123, 0.000123, 0.0000123 you are sure which one is which without effort?

I can't

When they’re aligned vertically, say as part of a table, then leaving the zeros in makes it much easier to read.

Not sure.

Check http://cryptomarketplot.com/accessible-index.html : the numbers are also aligned, and in less space that it would take if 5.744e-5 was to have all its leading zeroes.

Within each section, right now, the exponents remain the same. I’ll concede that when that’s true, the choice of notation is irrelevant.

However, occasionally, prices will straddle a boundary between 1.9eX and 9.0eY with |X - Y| = 1. In those cases, the different exponents will be easier to miss than the different number of digits or different number of leading 0s.

I would argue that in this case, the big change from 1.9 to 9.0 would catch your attention even more than the change in exponent.

But by the same login, I agree with you: .9eX and 9.0eY with |X - Y| = 1 may cause too much focus on what is a small difference.

Some hard choices were made. It is not perfect.

i disagree, the standard notation with 8 decimals is easier to process instantly. Or at least show everything with as <value>E-8 so that eyeballing is easy

3.436k is a much simpler way to remove the zeros, and actually includes one less character.

Yes for BTC, then for something 10x that 34.36 start looking not as good.

We could make an option for people who prefer regular numbers. I will add that to the feature requests.

I think I’ll look back on this day in the future and smile:

At one point the crypto bulls were so bullish that they worried they wouldn’t easily be able to fit in enough zeroes for the price without using scientific notation...”

I am indeed bullish on crypto, but the decision is driven by facts, not by passion.

The fact is the price range vary too much, even in the same scale (say BTC/USD vs XRP/USD), so we decided to have 5 characters for every price.

That requires the use of scientific notation.

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