We're soon past 2020 and it has been more than a decade since the introduction of Bitcoin. In the years that have passed, we have had countless users tell us that it is difficult and frustrating to adapt to some of Bitcoins peculiarities:
Some believe they can't afford a whole Bitcoin
Many have difficulty relating to what 0.00001645 is worth
Payment registers and bookkeeping doesn't support Bitcoin
Displaying small prices takes up a lot of space (think:
₿ 0.0000507vs$1)
All of the issues above share a common problem and represent significant friction against adoption in commerce. For people who only wants to speculate on value gains, this is not a problem, but for those who want to transition to a world where crypto is the predominant payment system and the unit of account to get a stable and globally accessible currency I believe we need to address this.
If we are to be successful, we should build our tools and services to work well in a world in which we are successful. In such a world, Bitcoin Cash will have a higher valuation, and this decimal problem will be worse than it is today.
Humans are not good at relating to small decimal numbers.
So lets break down the simplest way in which we can make this change easy and relatable. Just like we added "Cash" to Bitcoin, I suggest we add "Cash" to the Bit unit, to get Bitcash. This is already how many people, new users in particular, naturally talk about Bitcoin Cash and you can see a clear example here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vq_GK2ms5Ps&feature=youtu.be
Taking it one step further, if we assign the ticker XCH to the Bitcash unit we end up with something that address the problem above, while being compliant with the expectations of registers and bookkeeping applications.
I can get down and explain how and why in gritty detail, but I think the problem right now isn't that we don't have the information, but rather that we're lacking the agency to act. As such, I will instead link to a presentation by Andrew Clifford re-iterating that we have a problem here: https://youtu.be/TIQUmFH_I-4?t=307
Remember: if we don't serve our users well - we will fail to get adoption.
Bitcash is a pretty good name suggestion, "backward-compatible" with the traditional bit unit but simultaneously differentiating from a bit on BTC. Also bitcash is less confusing than bit w.r.t. the programming term.
I think XCH is both compatible with and unused so far in ISO 4217, so that's looking good too.
To complete the proposal, it would be nice to also have a currency symbol (like ₿) since using the full ticker XCH everywhere can be a bit verbose.