Hacker News Reader

Comment by nwh | Hacker News Reader

Wish people would stop using the term "bitcoins" as if they're singular metal entities, it seems to be where the perception that they are "too expensive" comes from.

Bitcoin. Divisible to 8 decimal places.

View on HN

Isn't the same as accepting dollars? Or Euros? Or pesos? Plural seems right to me.

I think it's a pedantic point, as I believe that language is as language does.... however, there's no reason why it couldn't be like "gold", which is also highly divisible. You need the "s" plural for things that can't be divided (like dollar bills). Thus, we don't get paid in "golds".

That said, semantically, coins aren't usually thought of as divisible things in a modern context-- they are pluralized, so bitcoin will probably be pluralized in the same way.

That's my thinking. Bitcoin is an outlier because "coin" is usually indivisible, where as "bitcoin" certainly is. You're never likely to see a price of more than one anyway, making the plural almost completely redundant.

> Thus, we don't get paid in "golds".

in case of gold it is in "kilograms" - still plural, even though it is divisible.

nwh has a point though. Bitcoins aren't things. It's not just that they don't have physical form. For example, you can record the serial number from a dollar bill and find it again later. You can't do that with "a bitcoin" because there is no bitcoin-thing that can be tracked, even digitally speaking. Each address has a balance, and each transaction deals with amounts of bitcoin. There is no owning or transferring of identifiable "bitcoins".

I think this gets into the non-standard definitions of money vs currency. I think that the headline refers to money, not currency.

Good luck with that. Overstock and Coinbase both link to this weusecoins YouTube video to explain the currency, which says "bitcoins" about a million times: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Um63OQz3bjo

Reply on news.ycombinator.com